Rock Steady
by GaggedCenobite
Summary: Complete. Nobody's really whole, we're just broken in different ways from each other. Jack/Thane.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer**: Mass Effect is the creative property of Bioware.

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**One**

Most people didn't realize that being unsociable and being informed weren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Most people assumed that in order to stay up-to-date on one's surroundings, one had to actually get out and talk to somebody, ask what was going on.

Most people, Jack decided, were fucking _morons_.

Growing up in the Terminus systems went a long way towards developing your situational awareness; either you learned to utilize your surroundings to your advantage or you woke up with the cold steel of a compliance collar around your neck, packed ten to a cell on a batarian slave cruiser...or worse, you didn't wake up at all, because some two-bit hood on Omega's streets had pulped your head with an electromag wrench in the interest of making a couple credits. The stakes were lethally high when you lived on the edge, and a little situational awareness went a long way towards tipping the odds in your favor. With experience having irreversibly burned this knowledge into her brain, it was a reasonable conclusion that Jack had chosen to stay in the Normandy's cargo hold for more reasons than its seclusion.

Sure, it was quiet and a good distance away from the rest of the assholes running the ship, and that was enough of a reason on its own to take over the hold. But the real advantage of the room was that the ship's designers had attempted to mimic the original Normandy's streamlined ventilation system without taking the SR-2's increased size into consideration, and the result was no less than five different openings to the vent shafts within twenty feet of the spot where Jack slept. It kept the room pleasantly cool, sure (and after coming out of cryo she'd found herself much more acclimated to the cold than she'd used to be), plus the vents could make for a quick escape route, but all of these were incidental. No, the great thing about the vents was that, if you were patient and stayed still, it was possible to eavesdrop on most of the Normandy. The shafts were wide enough that sound carried perfectly through them, and although the acoustics that came with metal surfaces could distort a voice somewhat, it was the best source of intelligence an unrepentant LWOP (that's "life without possibility of parole" for you upstanding citizens) could hope for in an unfamiliar environment.

Every conversation that went on in the mess hall came through in crisp detail, and with a little concentration it was simple enough to pick one out and listen in. This proved to be a hell of an asset for staying up to date, particularly since what Kelly Chambers knew, the _entire ship_ knew (and after days of putting up with the yeoman's incessant chirping, Jack was beginning to think her designation of Miranda as the "Cerberus cheerleader" was a bit premature). Even when the mess hall was quiet, there was always something going on elsewhere in the ship; at that very moment, Jack could hear heavy footsteps above her in one of the bays, as rhythmic and steady as a seven-hundred-pound metronome. That fucking krogan had been pacing for the last _two hours_, growling to himself with frustration, and the repetition was beginning to wear on the convict's last nerve. She understood boredom, and the itch to take the edge off with a good fight, but two hours? It could've cleaned that big-ass shotgun it carried around, or spent some quality time with one of the Fornax issues that kept circulating through the ship, or torn up Miranda's office. Preferably the last one.

_Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud._ A half-second pause. "He turns around, and..." Jack folded her arms, drumming her fingers against her biceps with staccato precision.

_Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. _Pause. "And turns again..."

Her shotgun was lying next to the bunk, freshly cleaned and loaded with a bandolier of thermal clips hanging off its stock. She could snag it, be upstairs in thirty seconds, and pick a fight with the krogan. It'd probably take the edge off his boredom, and after enduring those footsteps for the past two hours, she'd find throwing him across the hold to be immensely satisfying.

_Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. _Pause.

Jack was not one to suffer annoyances quietly. Adversity, _real_ adversity, she could deal with herself, with no need for anybody to go shoving their way into her business and asking if everything was 'all right', talking about feelings, all sorts of therapist bullshit like the commander kept trying to pull. Annoyances, though, tended to get dealt with swiftly and violently.

...therapists. Seriously? What kind of game was Shepard playing, coming around trying to be all friendly when it was obvious she didn't have any interest in being part of the big, happy Cerberus family? Probably thought he could peel back twenty layers of hardcore genocidal bitch and find a scared little girl who just wanted to be accepted, like in all those ridiculous gushy vids. Like it wasn't enough that Jack killed for their little band of misfits, Shepard wanted them all to be _friends_ on top of it. Maybe they could hold hands while skipping through the Omega 4 and getting lasered into shreds by the Collectors because their asshole commander couldn't figure out how to run an operation without everybody getting---

_Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud._ Pause.

"Okay, that's it," Jack growled out loud, grabbing the shotgun. She racked the slide, loading a thermal clip (a lesser person would've saved the gesture for attempting to intimidate the krogan, but Jack didn't waste gestures on the dead, which included anybody she intended to fight), and stormed over to the staircase, intent on going up and pummeling Grunt enough to make him stop pacing for five damn minutes. Just as she passed under one of the ducts, however, the faint echo of Joker's voice gave her a brief pause.

"Welcome back, Commander," the pilot was saying, and it wasn't hard at all to picture the smirk on his face. "So I hear you're two for two on Dantius sisters; gonna move on to the parents next, or...?"

"Can't take credit for that one, Joker. Our new recruit took out Nassana...not that I'm disappointed to see her go." Yeah, that was Shepard's voice. Jack wasn't really sure what to make of the commander at times; his shooting skills and the Star of Terra mounted in his cabin (she'd bypassed the lock and snuck in once in the interest of gathering some intelligence) testified that he knew how to kick ass when ass needed kicking...but the way he acted sometimes had her seriously wondering. The first words she'd said to him were "Shit, you sound like a pussy", which was kind of telling when it came to his demeanor.

Well, if Shepard was on his way back in with the away team, she'd have to go up, slap Grunt around, and be back in the cargo hold quickly. Their boss was the type to interfere with _perfectly normal_ ways of resolving a problem, and a lecture from him would just piss her off more at this point. So it was that the plan evolved as she quickly scaled the stairs: instead of actually getting a fight going, she'd just lob a singularity into the krogan's room and call it even. (He was, as far as Jack was concerned, getting lucky this time.) Yup, and there was the door, now, right past the elevator, which...was opening. Shit.

"EDI will scan your vital signs and get you the proper security clearance," a familiar voice was saying. "It's over here in the surveillance room; Zaeed usually hangs out there and guards the security system." Sure enough, it was Shepard, with another figure in tow. _Double_ shit.

Well, it was too late to just stop and head clear the other way; that'd look suspicious. No, she'd have to find a way to circle around, and that'd mean acting casual and getting past the commander. Trying to look as nonchalant as possible, Jack ambled up to Shepard and his companion, offering a curt nod. "Hey."

"What's up, Jack?" Shepard asked, evidently none the wiser—until about five seconds later, when his gaze dropped to the strap over her shoulder, eyes narrowing slightly. Slight suspicion edged his next question: "...and why are you armed?"

Ah, right, hadn't really thought this part through. "Going up to see the professor," she improvised. "Thing needs a little more kick if I'm gonna keep up with Grunt's new toy."

The commander rubbed at the back of his head, apparently finding the explanation reasonable. "To be fair, Grunt's not a biotic," he mused out loud. "But good to see you're keeping up nonetheless---"

Unexpectedly, the man at his side spoke up. "I take it this is another of the team, Commander?"

The voice was resonant, a crackling rasp lower than most humans were capable of reaching, and it gave Jack enough pause that she finally took a second to examine their new squadmate. He was a drell; that was immediately obvious. Emerald scales covered his exposed flesh (which, given the unzipped nature of his jacket, was pretty damn generous...not that Jack was one to talk), trailing up to reptilian ridges around his jawline. The dewlap at the base of his neck shifted with every word he spoke, its folds rippling whenever his voice hit a particularly low note.

Jack knew from experience that drell scales were smoother than they looked; she had encountered one before her Purgatory days, a hallex dealer from Omega. He'd sold her ten cases at a reasonable rate and she'd repaid him a few hours later, up against the wall in a filthy alley behind Afterlife. It hadn't been half bad.

"Ah, right, introductions." Shepard gestured towards the drell, and there was a rather transparent 'play nice' message in his eyes that Jack didn't particularly appreciate. "Jack, this is Thane Krios; he's going to be helping us out with the Collectors."

...Huh. The legendary assassin. That made the third celebrity on their ship...and unlike Shepard (whose accomplishments were all in Citadel space) and Archangel (who'd started his reign of terror shortly before they'd locked her in Purgatory and thrown away the key), she'd heard plenty about Krios and his ability to accomplish the impossible. He was supposed to be an obscenely good shot, capable of infiltrating, taking out his target, and vanishing again before anybody realized what had happened.

Well, they'd at least picked up someone who was competent...and who wasn't Cerberus, more importantly. Jack nodded cautiously at the drell.

To her surprise, Krios bowed his head in response. "A pleasure to meet you," he rasped. "I look forward to working with the---"

A crash down the hall cut him off. It had a vaguely meaty tone to it...rather as if a krogan had headbutted the port bay window. "The hell was that?!" Shepard exclaimed, glancing with alarm toward Grunt's door.

"Your pet krogan's been stomping around all fuckin' day," Jack spat, grateful for an obvious invitation to vent her annoyance. "Either shut him up or you're gonna find his head in your fish tank."

The commander was a man of priorities, and while he took issue with her tone, it held way less priority than addressing the (hulking, shotgun-wielding) problem. "Hang tight for a second, Thane," he said, legging it down the hall. "I'll be right back." The door closed behind him a moment later and, with a _whoosh_ of finality, left Jack in the hallway, alone with the puzzled assassin.

"Uh, we've got a krogan on the team," she offered, somewhat lamely, by way of explanation. "Kind of a pain in the ass sometimes. So, uh...you're Thane Krios, huh?" Almost before the sentence was out of her mouth, she winced, and a dull ache made itself known right next to her L5. Shit, what a way to start a conversation.

To his credit, the drell took it gracefully, not bothering to comment on her keen grasp of the obvious. "I am, yes," he answered, his back ramrod-straight and his hands clasped behind him.

Jack leaned back against the wall, taking a hand off her shotgun to scratch lightly at her close-cropped scalp. "It'll be nice to have somebody around who knows what the fuck they're doing," she conceded. "Plus you're not another Cerberus whore...less of those we have around here, the better."

A smile tugged at the edge of the assassin's lips as he studied her. Following his gaze over her tattoos, she noticed he had _two_ sets of eyelids over his gecko-like pupils...creepy. "You seem to have heard of me, then?" he inquired, not having missed the implied compliment to his skills.

"They say you're the best," Jack offered, shrugging a shoulder. "Hell, you're supposed to have a body count close to mine. 'sgotta count for something."

Krios nodded politely. "I was trained well," he demurred, still looking her over---no, _sizing her up_, Jack realized after a moment. Smart of him. She let just a touch of biotic energy shimmer around one hand, in an 'I know you know I know' type of posturing. No reason to let the assassin think she was intimidated.

His chuckle was rich in tone, and the frequencies of its inhumanly low pitch tickled at the back of her eardrums. "I believe I'm...passingly acquainted with you as well, actually. Your name was all over the hanar networks after that incident with the space station."

Both sets of eyelids opened wide for a second, the black sclera glazing over.

_--dismay and shock distilled down into politely-contained outrage, angry reds tinting the bioluminescent clouds. "Our holy moon, defaced." Melanindra's tentacles squirm with dismay. "The criminal has wronged us greatly. This one can only hope that she is brought to justice"--_

It was over and done with before his inner eyelids could finish blinking again. "You...agitated many hanar that day," Krios ventured, his voice neutral, but the implications obvious. "I have not seen such a display of grief since Rakhana."

Ah, right. The relationship between the two races was well-documented, and she probably should've considered the whole 'vandalism' incident before talking to a drell. Well, it wasn't like Jack was on the Normandy to make friends.

"Yeah," she said, shifting away from the wall a bit and resting her hand on the shotgun. "So you out for revenge or something? Because if you wanna throw down in the hall, believe me, I've been listening to that krogan all day and I'm fucking _spoiling_ for--"

"I have no intentions of starting a fight," he answered placatingly, holding up a hand. "We are on the same side now, and from what Commander Shepard tells me, you served a sentence already. A grudge anchors the soul to carnal thoughts, to vengeance, and I have no need for such a burden." His tone had not changed from the pleasant, nonchalant manner in which he'd introduced himself, but Jack still got the impression he was indirectly trying to get a shot in.

Leaning forward a bit, Jack stared the drell down, making a point of keeping the shotgun between them like a protective talisman. "Good," she finally said. "Stay out of my way, Krios, and I'll stay out of yours. You start getting a stick up your ass about the space station and want me to splatter you, let me know and I'll oblige."

_Whooosh_. Shepard hurried back out into the corridor, sweat gleaming on his forehead. "That was...tense," he grimaced. "Situation's defused for now, but we're setting a course for Tuchanka." There was a pause as he examined the two, and the frosty silence between them obviously didn't go unnoticed. "...Everything all right here?" he finally asked.

Jack didn't break the stare. "Peachy."

"Quite," Krios agreed, bowing affably. "Your crew is fascinating, Shepard, and it'll be quite the experience to work with them. Now, about that security clearance?"

With that, he turned, and the two men headed down the hallway, chatting quietly about Grunt and the Tuchanka trip. Jack watched them disappear into the surveillance room, then turned and marched back to the stairs. Fucking hanar-lovers, thinking they owned a monopoly on being wronged.

On the way back, she stopped at Grunt's door, banging on it twice with the shotgun. "Hey! Krogan!"

"What?!" called an agitated voice from inside.

Content that he was within, Jack tossed a biotic warp inside the room and headed down the stairs. The enraged bellowing, punctuated by crashing metal and breaking glass, brought a satisfied smirk to her face. Underneath it, though, she was still a little unsettled by the conversation with Krios. She'd established dominance, sure, but he didn't seem impressed, and she still wasn't convinced he wouldn't try to get payback for the hanar.

Ah well. Considering the circumstances, it was just another thing to keep an eye on. Hopefully he'd be content with the terms she'd laid out, and they'd get through the mission without any incidents.

Hell, if all went well, they wouldn't exchange another word.


	2. Chapter 2

Mass Effect is the property of Bioware.

**A/N:** Wow, what a response. Thanks for the support so far, and I hope you continue to enjoy.

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**Two**

_All experiments in effect continue to show promise, though they require extensive testing and precautions prior to implementation. Subject Zero's adaptability, combined with refinement of the prototypes after initial trials, has resulted in multiple successes so far._

_Controlled trials with the other subjects have also proven effective; in addition to providing operant conditioning for an aggressive mindset, they have given us a source of field test data for Subject Zero's adjustment to our procedures._

_Tomorrow at 0700, we will implant the experimental amp; Subject Zero is expected to be lucid and test-ready within two standard hours of the procedure._

Normally it would be easy enough to defuse the moment with a joke about inflight reading, but as Jack clicked off the datapad and set it down on the seat next to her, she couldn't quite muster up the pretense. Rage bubbled up in her chest, mingling with a vague nausea at her recollections of the Pragia facility, the constant forced 'training', the surgeries...

...like the amp. Jack reached back and ran a fingertip over the scar on her neck; it, along with the surge of power that shot from her hands every time she used her biotics, was the sole memento of that procedure. Over half her more prominent scars weren't from fights, as people often assumed, but remnants from the numerous surgical procedures she'd undergone as a child: needles inserted, amps connected, fibers strengthened. She muttered a curse to herself, but it was swallowed up in the roar of the shuttle's engines. At least the ride couldn't last much longer; they'd been flying for almost thirty minutes since breaking atmo and it wouldn't be much longer before the team was at the landing zone and could get this over with.

"All right, let's go over the plan again." Ah, there it was, the world's most unwelcome intrusion this side of Kelly Chambers. Shepard had a persistent habit of rehashing the plan before they touched down, citing a need to be prepared; this was all well and good, but in the month Jack had spent on the Normandy strike team she had not _once_ seen one of the commander's plans survive contact with the enemy. Well, more power to him for at least sticking to his guns.

"All we have from intelligence reports is that the Blue Suns have forcibly taken over Zorya's largest mineral refinery," Shepard said, examining the mission briefing on the datapad. "They've got the workers hostage, and they aren't making demands, so we can probably assume they're using anybody still there as forced labor."

Zaeed Messani, who was in the seat next to him, spat out of the shuttle's bay door. "Blue Suns," he growled. "Used to mean something before they turned into goddamned thugs for hire. Probably just looking to make a few quick credits and then torch the place."

It seemed likely that most of the team would be fighting each other in the absence of the Collectors as a mutual enemy, but Zaeed...well, Zaeed was okay, Jack had decided. He was pragmatic, had his head screwed on right when it came to dealing with problems, and most importantly, wouldn't be stabbing them in the back before he got his money. Plus he was old enough to be her father, meaning there weren't many tricks he hadn't seen and he always had a story to pass the time. Apparently, it'd been his idea to go to Zorya and do this particular mission, which meant he was probably getting paid extra for it. Ah well, she was grateful for the action nonetheless.

"Our first priority," Shepard announced, slamming a fist into his palm for emphasis, "is the safety of the hostages. After securing the area, we'll escort them out to the landing zone for pickup."

Jack raised a hand, waving it like an impertinent child in grade school. "Uh, dunno if you noticed this, Shepard, but this isn't exactly the kind of group you bring if you're looking to deal with a hostage situation." She, at least, didn't believe in the concept of 'overkill'. (Or 'collateral damage'.)

Her words drew a bemused snort from Zaeed. "'struth," he agreed, and cocked his assault rifle for emphasis.

To his credit, the commander had gotten used to her occasional jab, and was a big enough boy to not get his feelings hurt. "That's why you two are going to be dealing with the Suns," he clarified. "I've got a little experience dealing with situations that require some precision--" ..._well, that was modest of him... _"--and Thane's coming along to back me up with hostage extraction."

Ah yes, the elephant in the room. In the week since they'd picked up Krios, Jack had done her best to live up to her end of the 'deal' and stay away from him. That hadn't been hard, since she stayed away from _everyone_, but the next thing she knew he was coming along on the Zorya job, and what's more, he was in the seat next to her on the shuttle. Go figure.

"Understood, Commander." Even while leaning back in the chair, he looked poised, ready to spring at any given moment. "What kind of resistance are we anticipating?"

"If I know Vido," Zaeed answered, "he'll have a fully kitted-out division holed up there, just in case somebody comes to punch holes in his sorry arse. Maybe even a mech, if he's really feeling scared." He chortled, a bloodthirsty gleam in his good eye. "Not that it'll save him."

"We're not here to deal with vendettas," warned Shepard, holding a finger up. "Stick to the plan, people. Everything will go fine as long as nobody goes off the rails and jeopardizes the mission."

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, the mission had been thoroughly jeopardized.

Vido Santiago had an entire platoon of mercs, wielding the kind of armaments you expected to see from the Alliance navy. He'd locked the hostages in the back of the refinery (to Shepard's dismay) and bolted as fast as his now-gimped legs would take him, heading for his gunship (to Zaeed's dismay). The two were now engaged in an intense argument about the nature of the mission and the chain of command, right there in the middle of the pumping station.

Oh, and _the refinery was on fucking fire_, courtesy of Zaeed's 'improvisation'.

"I told you to stick to the plan!" Shepard roared, looking about two stops short of punching the merc. "We could've laid down suppressing fire; there was no need for you to do that! Now you've endangered the hostages as well!"

Zaeed didn't back down, growling right back in the commander's face. "I don't give a good goddamn about those workers," he snarled. "I've chased that bastard for twenty years, and if he gets away now I'm blaming _you_. So if you want to stand here and shoot the breeze while he limps off into the sunset---"

Gunshots rang out, and the team dropped into cover. Jack, who had stayed out of the argument (for once) was over by the door, hiding behind a power conduit, and as she turned around, she discovered Thane had taken refuge beside her. "Hostiles, two at twelve o'clock and one on the railing," he advised, all business. Jack decided not to complain about taking the drell's orders (there were other, more heavily armed threats at the moment) and leaned out to fill a heavy weapons trooper's chestplate with 00 buckshot. Unfortunately, she was far enough away that the spread only staggered the Blue Sun, and he was more than conscious enough to pull the trigger and fire a rocket at her position.

Well, no problem there. Jack reached out with a biotic wave, snagged the rocket out of the air, and directed it into the side of the rigging. Hell, it was already on fire, what could another explosion matter?

"Jack!" the commander called, his voice clear even over the flames and gunfire. "Get up front; you're heading with Zaeed. Take out Santiago and rendezvous with us at the LZ; Thane and I are heading to---"

The rest of his words were drowned out in a shriek of metal and a deafening crash, as the entire rig that Jack had crashed the rocket into tipped over and collapsed to the floor in the midst of the room. Dust and smoke clouded her vision, and she ducked behind the conduit just as Krios stood up and squeezed off a single shot from his sniper rifle. The unmistakable sound of a batarian yelping, followed by the impact of a body on the floor, echoed over the crackling fire.

"How'd you hit the son of a bitch?" she asked, blinking. "I can't see more than ten feet in here."

"Neither can I," the drell answered, changing the heatsink on his gun. "I memorized where he was standing and adjusted for a heart shot."

Before Jack could comment, the radio crackled with static. "Shepard here, do you copy?"

"Copy, Commander," Krios responded. "We're all right, but it looks like the wreckage has cut us off." He was correct: the floor was now piled high with collapsed infrastructure, and the way those fires were going, there was no way they'd be getting over it. Jack felt her cheeks burn slightly. What a dumbass move; should've sent the rocket back at the heavy.

"All right, change of plans," Shepard's disembodied voice ordered. "Zaeed and I will chase Vido. Thane, take Jack and extract the hostages. See if you can activate the sprinkler system while you're at it. We'll meet you at the LZ."

Without a word, Krios hopped over the conduit and raced up the stairs next to their position. Jack followed, cursing her luck all the way. "See, this is where it starts," she muttered. "First they've got me rescuing hostages and then the next thing you know, they'll have me leading negotiations and cutting ribbons on fuckin' shopping malls---"

"Contact!" the drell rasped, breaking her out of her reverie. Sure enough, they'd rounded the corner right into a pair of Blue Suns, who had likely been fleeing the destruction. Neither had the time to so much as raise their weapons; Krios planted a kick in the human's midsection and dropped him, gurgling, with a lightning-fast pistol shot to the throat. Jack, not feeling nearly as hands-on, simply grabbed the turian with her biotics and rammed him into the wall. He slumped to the ground, assault rifle clattering to one side, and raised his arms in supplication (probably about to drum out one of those tired pleas, like "No, please" or "I can pay you") just in time to catch a shotgun blast to the face that painted the wall behind him a deep shade of blue and gray.

She turned to a control console as Krios knelt behind her, his head bowed in a silent prayer for the freshly dead. "Found the fire system. Turning it on now." One confirmation later, and sprinklers erupted from the facility's ceilings, showering the wreckage in thick foam and dousing the flames. "I turned the power off as well," she added into the radio, "so the fires should be out soon."

"Copy. Good job, you two." Shepard sounded pleased, if a bit strained; they were obviously taking heavy fire on his end of the refinery. "Get those hostages and we're good to go."

Krios coughed behind her, just a bit more violently than was normal. It gave her enough pause to turn to him. "Problems with the smoke?"

"Er...a bit," he confessed, looking almost embarrassed, "but nothing major. Let's get those workers out and head to the rendezvous point." Without even a pause, he turned and vaulted the staircase's railing, rushing down towards the back of the refinery, where the hostages would presumably be kept. Jack followed close behind, keeping an eye on their six for any reinforcements from the Blue Suns.

As they reached the halfway point on the fire escape, the drell surprised her by speaking up. "You're doing very well," he said, his breathing beginning to ease up with the return of fresh oxygen into the air. "I imagine you'd rather have stayed with the original plan, but for what it's worth, you're adapting nicely to the role."

"I don't need your praise, Krios," she growled. "I'm not some little kid that has to be complimented every time they can wipe their own ass." There was a brief pause when they reached the bottom of the stairs; after checking the hall for hostiles, the two headed for the locked door in front of them, and Jack continued, "I'm not doing this for anybody's approval, I do it because I was made for it."

"'Made', you said," Thane mused, brute-forcing the lock with his omni-tool. "An interesting choice of words."

There was no more time for conversation, to Jack's great relief, because the door slid open and they were faced with a cluster of terrified refinery workers. All of them were talking at once, frantically begging for help and asking if she'd come to save them and decrying the Blue Suns for what they'd done and oh god the things they'd been put through for the last week and---

_BANG_. The room went silent, and Jack lowered her shotgun, resting its stock on her shoulder. "Settle down, or the next one isn't going in the ceiling," she stated flatly.

"Not quite the way I would've handled the situation, but it works," Krios agreed. He raised his voice, addressing the cowed workers. "We've come to rescue you. Transportation is waiting outside, and we need you to follow us in an orderly fashion to the shuttle. Although the fires are out, there are still mercenaries in the area, so stay behind us and try to---"

At this point, the wall exploded, which was definitely not part of the plan.

The hostages, bless them, hit the ground out of sheer reflex, which saved them from the curtain of gatling rounds that swept over the room seconds later. Jack's shields took a couple of the shots, allowing her to duck behind a computer terminal next to Krios, who was still cool as a cucumber and loading a disruptor magazine into his rifle. "The hell was that?" she shouted over the barrage of gunfire.

"Heavy mech, most likely," he answered, turning to peer through a gap in the cover with his scope. A moment later, the assassin ducked back into cover, bullets crashing into the terminal's side. "Definitely a heavy mech. I don't have any explosive ordnance...suggestions?"

Jack popped her head up and scanned the area for the half-second she could afford to take; a rocket flew overhead as she threw herself back down. "Lots of consoles around here," she mused. "Could try blowing one up, seeing if we could take down the shields."

Krios shook his head. "We can't," he said. "The hostages would be injured or killed. They can't move out of cover as it is, and there'd be no way to get them out of the blast."

She stared, mouth slightly agape. "Fuck them. It's _our_ necks on the line here, Krios."

"That," he answered, taking another opportunity to scan the room, "is not an excuse to justify endangering the innocent."

"You got a better idea?"

"I have _something_," the drell admitted. "The sprinklers are still on; perhaps if we could lure the mech into them, the foam would short out its shield generator and make it vulnerable." He peered out again; the YMIR had finished tearing its way through the wall and was stomping towards the hostages. A ceiling-mounted sprayer was about fifteen feet behind it, dousing the ground with emergency foam. "It would require...significant force, though, and we don't have much time before that mech flanks the workers."

It could be said at this point that Jack was undergoing a slight crisis. The plan was ridiculous, and more than likely to get both of them killed, all for the sake of some working stiffs who sure as hell weren't contributing to their mission. But it was better than anything she could come up with, and she _could_ take an YMIR if she caught it off guard...hell, she'd crushed three of them at Purgatory.

Squeezing her eyes shut, and knowing she was going to regret this, Jack finally spoke up. "All right. I can do it."

"Are you sure?" Krios asked. His mouth quirked slightly; either amusement or concern, she couldn't tell.

"Yeah. Take a shot or two and keep that thing distracted; I'll move in close and push it into the sprinklers."

"Very well." A fresh heatsink clicked into the rifle, humming eagerly. "I'll finish it off once you drop the shields. We will need to move as one..."

Of all the people to form a well-oiled machine with. If there was a god (and Jack knew there was not, because the first twelve years of her life had shown otherwise), he had to be laughing at this. Gritting her teeth, Jack holstered the shotgun and leaned against the edge of the terminal, poised and ready. "Just for the record," she muttered over her shoulder, "your plan sucks."

His voice, resonant behind her, broke into a chuckle despite itself. "I'll take that under advisement." A pause then, what felt like an eternity of anticipation, and....

"Go!"

She could see his form out of the corner of her eye as she dove forward and rolled; a black and green blur leaping up onto the terminal, bringing the sights to bear impossibly fast, and _bang_, a round bounced off the shields at the back of the mech's head. The metal hulk staggered slightly from the impact, whirling around and hoisting its gatling gun, but Jack was already on the move. Darting between two extranet nodes, she dropped low and slid under the onslaught of gatling rounds that ripped through the air, already charging her biotics up.

_Bang_. Another shot; this one actually hit the kinetic barrier with enough force to knock the mech's aim off a little. Its rapid fire arced upwards momentarily, and Jack saw the opportunity. She vaulted the node next to her, leaping through the air like a round from an M-290, and in the half-second before her biotically enhanced shoulder charge nailed the mech square in the chestplate, settled for the only battle cry she knew: "FUCK _YOU_!"

The impact was prodigious.

All around her, the world exploded into white, and after a brief spike of sharp, warm pain, everything faded into a comfortable numbness. She was vaguely aware of her body hitting the ground, of a brief shortness of breath, and her vision cleared just enough to make out the YMIR mech, distant, as though it were in a tunnel. A muffled _bang_ cued its head flying clean off its shoulders, smashing against the metal floor; the body, meanwhile, stumbled backwards awkwardly and tumbled head over heels out of a window, crashing to the ground several stories below.

Watching the mushroom cloud blossom outside the window in a reddish-orange haze, Jack decided it was the prettiest thing she'd seen in a long time, and then promptly lost consciousness.

* * *

"...ink she's waking up, Commander."

"Jack? Jack, can you hear me? Are you all right?"

The light was way brighter than light had any right to be, and she could feel a distinct throbbing behind her eyes. Upholstery pressed against her back, and a cold breeze was playing havoc with her skin. Jack tried to process her situation, but the last few minutes had been hazy...there was a heavy mech, and she tackled it, and...yeah, that was about it.

"...Shit," she grumbled, raising a hand to rub at her eyes.

"Well, she's clearly not brain-damaged, heh." That was Zaeed's voice. Did that mean the rest of the team was here?

Everything came into focus after a few seconds. She was definitely in the shuttle, lying on her back in one of the seats. Two pairs of eyes stared down at her, one deep brown (that would be the commander) and one almost black, with green slit-pupils.

"How do you feel?" Krios asked, his brow-ridges twitching slightly. It took a moment to realize that he and Shepard were close, _much_ closer than she preferred to let people get.

After a moment, Jack sat up, waving the two of them off. "Ugh...'mfine," she mumbled, kneading at her temples with both hands. "Just took a few hits, nothing big."

Shepard's voice was tinged with a hint of pride. "We have a transport evacuating the hostages right now; Thane carried you out with them after the mech blew up. Great work down there, you two." He turned, apparently satisfied that she was all right, and headed back to the other side of the cabin to chat with Zaeed.

The drell sat down beside her, studying Jack with apparent interest. "You should have the doctor examine you when we return to the ship," he finally said. "You could have damaged your shoulder from hitting the heavy mech."

"It's all right." Her tone was a little more dismissive than she intended. "I'd know if it was broken...been through that enough times. And I can move it, so it's fine."

"Very well. I hadn't expected you to...do _that_. It was my assumption that you'd hit it with a warp or something similar, like most biotics."

"I'm not 'most biotics' material, Krios," Jack retorted with a half-grin. "I'm a little more hands-on."

"So I see," he agreed, amusement playing in his expression. "Well. Regardless of the methods, you performed just as instructed, and we took down the mech cleanly. Well done."

"Yeah...yeah, thanks. You did well too." She waved a hand in a meaningless little gesture. "Nice headshot."

The drell cocked his head slightly, lips parted in what Jack swore was an attempt to conceal a smirk. "Odd, I thought you didn't need my praise."

"I don't," she stated, and folded her arms to emphasize the point. "Look, don't go dragging this out, all right? I'm not good with the playing-nice shit. But thanks. And thanks for bringing me back here." Gratitude was a bitter pill to swallow; it meant she owed someone, and usually they took the opportunity to rub it in.

"You're welcome," he said, and then leaned back to look out the window.

They passed the next ten minutes in silence, save for the thrum of the shuttle's engines and the quiet debriefing going on across the cabin. Finally, after what felt like forever:

"Hey, Krios?"

"Yes?"

"You're all right."

"Thank you, Jack."

"....Don't go spreading this around."

"Your secret's safe with me."

"Good."

As the shuttle roared up through the atmosphere, heading towards the Normandy's docking bay, Jack decided that despite—or perhaps because of—nothing at all going to plan, she was pretty damn satisfied with this particular mission.

They'd have to do this again sometime.


	3. Chapter 3

Mass Effect is the property of Bioware.

* * *

**Three**

Looking decidedly pleased with himself, Mess Sergeant Gardner set a loaded tray down on his counter and (almost as an afterthought) added a fork. "That oughta do it," he declared with customary cheer. "Anything else?"

Regardless of the numerous speeches Shepard had given them about setting differences aside and working together, Jack was well aware she'd never be all buddy-buddy with the rest of the crew. The whole "part of a team" thing didn't change the fact that old habits die hard, and if a major part of those habits just happened to be a need for plenty of solitude...well, that trumped the team thing anyday. Besides, it wasn't like any of them _wanted_ her around; most of them were a little too sensitive for her tastes.

So it was that, while most of the team tended to take their meals in the mess hall, Jack preferred to bring her food back down to the hold. It was a win/win situation for everybody, she rationalized: the rest of the team didn't have to put up with her 'type A' personality (the yeoman's words, not Jack's) and she didn't have to put up with their incessant bullshit.

"Nah, that's all," she replied, picking up the tray and heading out of the mess hall. Half the Cerberus crew was in the midst of eating already, including Commander Shepard, who was at the end of the table with Tali'Zorah and Archangel. No surprise there; they were practically joined at the hip. According to the turian's claims, the three of them had taken down Saren Arterius at the battle of the Citadel, and everything Jack had seen pointed to that claim being entirely true. Off the battlefield, the commander's habit of referring to the odd pair as his best friends (along with a former lieutenant of his, whose name Jack hadn't quite caught) was well-known aboard the Normandy.

Jack rolled her eyes as the elevator doors slid shut in front of her. Sooner or later, their 'fearless leader' would figure out that friends weren't a commodity you could afford to have in this kind of environment. Being close to your running crew, as she had learned from experience, was usually just inviting trouble; it meant they had an easier time taking advantage of you and from there on, it was a slippery slope. She'd had her fair share of friends, back in the day, and it hadn't brought her any more than a nasty gunshot scar on one shoulder, two attempted rapes, and countless instances of getting screwed out of her share of the loot.

"...Who am I kidding?" she muttered. "This mission's a one-way trip, it won't matter either way."

With that uplifting thought, she stepped from the elevator and mosied down the steps, taking care to hold the tray steady. While the steak Gardner had handed over was of normal size, Jack's plate was perhaps a bit overloaded with slices of Aegohr fire-pear, and she was determined not to lose any. The cinnamon-like fruit was a rare treat back in the Pragia complex (though the standards for 'treat' back then were limited to 'has a taste'), and she'd had a bit of a weakness for it ever since. As it happened, she hadn't even made it all the way to the cot before giving in to temptation and popping one of the slices into her mouth.

_Mmmm, still fresh_. Feeling a little better about the state of the world, she sat down and pulled out the datapad, examining another of the Cerberus logs.

_Subject Zero is rejecting the muscle weave implants. Recommend increased dosage of immunosuppressants for one week, then an intensified conditioning regimen to encourage implant grafting._

Ha, 'conditioning'. Beatings, in other words, and a couple rounds in their little fight club. Electric prods between the shoulders whenever she held back from kicking the living shit out of another kid (which, after the first few times, was not often), and syringes loaded up with every sedative known to man. It pissed Jack off that Cerberus had done this to her, of course, but on some level it pissed her off just as much that they treated it with such a clinical detachment.

"Bastards," she growled, shoving the datapad away. Distantly, she was aware of nails biting into her palm, a thin trail of blood trickling out of her clenched, shaking fist.

What the hell kind of right did they have? Miranda would probably have some fucked-up justification along the lines of "Oh, but the Illusive Man didn't know about this so it's not our fault" (for all of his vaunted intelligence and control, the Illusive Man ran a remarkably loose ship; if all the stories Archangel told about their experiments were true, it was a wonder that the Lazarus Project hadn't turned Shepard into some kind of berserk Frankenstein slaughtering everything on the station), but nothing excused this kind of thing. Jack had half a mind to go up there and space the Cerberus cheerleader. Hell, the airlock was right there---

"Pardon me."

Her head snapped up, train of thought totally derailed. People usually treated the cargo hold as a dragon's lair, heading down at their own risk. Other than the commander, nobody made it a habit of coming within twenty feet of her, usually.

And yet, there was Thane Krios, with a stalk of some kind of leafy produce in hand, leaning against a bulkhead. Jack definitely hadn't heard him coming down, but then, she'd been a bit distracted, and he _was_ the galaxy's premiere assassin.

"I...am not quite comfortable yet with the mess hall," he began, pausing to chew on a leaf. It crunched loudly between his teeth. "Too much open space, which means too much vulnerability. It's paranoid, I know."

He paused, as if expecting a response. Jack blinked at the drell, feeling that the conversation was rapidly becoming a bit more surreal than she preferred.

"I was wondering, then," Krios dutifully continued after a moment, "if you would mind me joining you for a while. Best to ease into the whole 'sociable' thing, if I'm going to get to know the team."

After a second, she shrugged. "Shit, most of them aren't worth getting to know if you ask me. But we're cool, and you don't talk much, so..." One leg stretched out and shoved a chair over to him.

Catching the chair, the assassin settled down, finally seeming to relax a bit as he bit into the snack. "Ah, thank you."

"Mmhmm."

The next few minutes passed in a pleasant silence. Jack dug into her steak, finishing it off in a little less than two minutes; habits, again, die hard, and she was used to wolfing down what food could be scrounged before somebody could try to take it. With a remarkable display of willpower, she'd left the Aegohr pears for last, and took the opportunity to savor a slice. Damn, but those salarians could grow some good fruit.

Krios, meanwhile, contentedly munched whatever bizarre vegetable he was carrying. The noise wasn't loud enough to be annoying, and he hadn't said anything yet, so as far as Jack could tell, she didn't have any reason to kick him out quite yet. It wasn't that she didn't enjoy a conversation now and then, but nobody on the Normandy reallyshared her interests (well, the krogan, maybe, but their relationship was...strained, to say the least). Listening to someone rambling on about nothing, which was what most conversations with these people consisted of, didn't do anything more than eat at her patience. Plus, spending ten minutes with the Normandy's crew seemed to mean you were best friends, in their eyes, and then they'd get to discussing all kinds of personal shit. Ugh.

"So what were you doing when Shepard found you?" the drell asked, breaking the tenuous silence. His reptilian eyes peered from over a leaf, studying her.

Jack shrugged. "Purgatory cryo."

"The prison ship?" He sounded politely interested, but totally unsurprised...which made sense, Jack thought, remembering the whole space station thing.

"Yeah." The bowl of fire-pear slices had been thoroughly emptied out, and she dipped a finger in, swirling the juice absently. "HMEC spent a couple million creds getting me moved from Hebat to Purgatory...didn't like that I was shaking down their operations, I guess. I spent about a month in general population, then three guys jumped me in the showers and I smashed their heads in. Kirril sent me to cryo after that."

"Interesting." Krios rested his chin on a palm, the snack forgotten for a moment. "I don't suppose he intended on releasing you."

Jack stood, crossing the room, and carried the datapad over to her terminal. "He'd have found a high enough bidder eventually, I guess," she answered, plugging the device in. "And then they would've defrosted me, and I would've killed the crew, taken the ship and gotten back to doing what I do best."

There was a thoughtful pause, and then the assassin nodded behind her. "I can't say you'd be doing the wrong thing there," he mused. "I find it hard to muster sympathy for anyone who would traffic in sentient beings."

She rolled her eyes, though he couldn't see it. Like she needed anybody's approval.

The datapad beeped, and Jack pressed a button to start downloading the next batch of archives. "So, my turn," she said, not bothering to look back. "Guess Shepard found you on the job?"

"He did," was the answer as Krios gnawed pensively on a leaf. "It was to be my final assassination, actually, but it looks like I'll have one more mission after all."

"One last mission before retirement, huh?" she snorted. "Just like all the old vids. Don't go saying it too much, you're liable to die."

The silence that pervaded the cargo hold for the next minute was palpable.

Eventually, the drell spoke up again, the low warble of his voice amplified by the room's acoustics. "The day before yesterday," he said, clearly choosing his words carefully, "when we were on Zorya..."

Jack felt her shoulders drop slightly in exasperation. Ah yes, the teamwork talk.

"...I noticed you said that you had been 'made' into what you are, implying the involvement of outside forces."

...Wait, _what_? He'd remembered that?

"Would it be overstepping my boundaries to ask--"

"Hey, fuck _you_, Krios," Jack growled over her shoulder. "Did Shepard put you up to this? He's always coming down here and jerking my chain about feelings and shit, and I wouldn't put it past him." She whirled, glaring at the assassin, whose inner eyelids blinked with surprise. "Look, I said you were all right. I _didn't_ say I was interested in spilling everything so you can try to headshrink me like everybody else on the Normandy keeps doing."

Leaning forward slightly, she brandished a fist in the kind of pose that usually scared off non-biotics in gen pop. "I don't need a therapist and I sure as hell don't need a best friend, especially not on a Cerberus ship, so _fuck off_." With that, she turned back to the console, angrily jerking out the connector cable and separating the datapad.

After a moment, his voice echoed somewhere behind her, sounding more or less unfazed. "I merely asked out of a professional curiosity. I happen to be a 'made' artist myself."

She turned, scratching at the back of her head with mild frustration, and sat back down on the cot, datapad in hand. "Is it even _possible_ to piss you off?" Really, she wasn't sure whether she was more annoyed that he'd asked the question or that he hadn't been suitably cowed by her answer.

"It's a difficult task," Krios answered smoothly, steepling his scaled fingers. "Those of my faith temper their souls, accepting that adversity enters into every life. A rash decision, made in haste from anger, sadness, even affection, could leave a heavy burden on our conscience. The actions of the body should not deface the soul."

Jack eyed the drell warily. He sounded a lot like a charismatic asari she'd once known who'd been convinced of her own messiah-hood. Snatches of the past sprung to her mind unbidden: hair falling away under the razor, a concoction of hallucinogens and sensory stimulants bubbling in a chalice, cold lips pressed to her forehead in a ritual kiss that heralded the start of the 'initiation' ceremony. "Don't see many _religious_ assassins out there."

He acknowledged the statement with a nod. "The traditional beliefs of the drell hold the soul separate from the body. It's not too dissimilar to some human religions, as I understand."

"Wouldn't know," she answered, perhaps a little too quickly, and busied herself with pulling up a new entry on the datapad.

Krios continued after a moment, apparently deciding not to pursue that line of thought. "But back on topic: I was saying that I was trained for this path from the age of six. From your words earlier, I thought we might have some common ground there, but I did not mean to pry, and I apologize if I've offended."

"'sokay. Just don't do it again."

The rest of the meal passed in silence, for which she was eminently grateful.

* * *

Having poor impulse control was not really something Jack saw as a flaw, but at times it came back to bite her in the ass. Seven different times now, she'd settled down on the cot and attempted to get some sleep, and seven different times it had proven to be totally impossible. Every time her eyes closed, her mind remained racing with thoughts of the Pragia complex, stirred up by her perusal of the Cerberus data that afternoon. Eventually, she'd ended up pacing back and forth in the hold, fists balled up and teeth gritting, feeling for all the world like that damn krogan.

It wasn't right. Certainly, she didn't hold any illusions that she wasn't a bad person now, but back then she'd been a _kid_, not even sure about the world around her, let alone any kind of moral system. Nobody at that age deserved the kind of treatment the Pragia children had received, and nobody _ever_ deserved to have to carry that kind of thing their whole life.

It _wasn't right_.

With a feral snarl, Jack whirled on her heel and slammed a fist into the wall; the biotics helped to actually make a small dent in the steel, but she mostly succeeded only in making her knuckles ache. The display next to her flickered on, and the image of the ship's AI stared out. "Please refrain from causing damage to the ship's interior," its maddeningly-calm voice ordered.

"Get fucked, machine," she growled back, wondering if it had a mute button.

"Further offenses will result in being placed on the watchlist with Urdnot Grunt."

Jack sighed. Great, associated with the krogan. It'd be worth it if it meant she stopped constantly thinking about the facility, but that didn't look too likely at this rate---

--and then, almost on an impulse, she turned her head to look at EDI's projection. "Where's the drell? Is he on the ship?"

"Thane Krios is currently residing in the life support unit," the AI responded.

It felt like her body was moving by itself, heading up the stairs towards the elevator. Rational thought was screaming at her not to go up there; the more anybody knew about her, the more they potentially had to use against her. Hell, if it were Shepard asking, and probably trying to get a better handle on her, she'd definitely clam up.

But Krios _hadn't_ asked, at least not in the same way. He'd only been interested on a professional level, and he'd dropped it when she told him to. Besides, nothing she'd tried so far had worked, and on a gut level, it had occurred to Jack that maybe if she got all this off her chest, unloaded it on someone, that tight feeling in her chest would loosen and the oppressive, bubbling rage would die down a bit. It wasn't something she'd take any pleasure in, but if it meant she got a little sleep, she could deal with a little discomfort.

* * *

"Ah, Commander," Thane offered in greeting, rising from his chair and turning towards the door. "It's good to---"

The door hadn't even slid all the way shut before Jack blurted out "Pragia," which was probably the worst way to open a conversation ever.

Krios was clearly caught a bit off guard, partly by the appearance of the last person he was expecting and partly by her non-sequitur greeting. "Er...Jack, hello. What's this about Pragia?"

"You wanted to know," she answered, stalking back and forth like a hungry varren and spilling out a stream-of-consciousness rant all the while. "Cerberus raised me in a research base on Pragia; for all I know I was born there. They ran tests, installed implants, experimented on me and a bunch of other kids until I escaped at about twelve. Killed everybody in the facility and caught a freighter off-world. Shepard let me into the Cerberus archives and it's like they were trying to turn me into some kinda super-soldier. I guess it worked."

Stopping to finally take a breath, she paused and collected herself for a second. "..._Shit_, it's still the same."

"I don't follow," Krios said, rubbing at his chin.

"This was supposed to make it so I could get back to sleep," Jack clarified as her pacing became even more agitated. "I've got a thousand little uninvited memories running through my head, and I thought if I spilled some of it, I'd be able to get it off my mind. Fuck, this was a bad idea." She rubbed at the bridge of her nose, hoping to stave off the headache that would most definitely be coming.

"Well," the assassin answered slowly, his eyes following her as she stalked back and forth by a weapon rack, "I can't exactly give you absolution there."

"Figures." She turned, heading for the door, determined to go back to the cargo hold and pretend that none of this had happened for the rest of the mission.

He spoke up right before she could reach the door, stopping her in her tracks. "Have you considered going back there, though? It might help if you could revisit the base...perhaps having gained some perspective, you could put it behind you."

Jack paused, one hand playing with the door's control panel. "No reason we'd be heading out that way."

"Perhaps Commander Shepard might see the wisdom of making a resource run in that system," Krios countered, one finger raised. "You should talk to him; I think you'll find he's very accommodating when it comes to the needs of his crew."

"I'm not really interested in owing him one." She glanced back over her shoulder at the drell, eyes narrowed. "Or owing anybody, for that matter."

He nodded. "Fair enough. I'm only trying to provide a different perspective, Jack: your body will carry the effects of a childhood among Cerberus forever, but there is no reason that your soul should share that burden."

For the next half-minute or so, the room was quiet, save for the thrum of the life support system's ventilators. Jack chewed on her lip roughly, staring at the door. Was it worth it? Normally she would say no out of principle, but Krios was, if nothing else, very _sure_ of himself...and some decent rest would be nice. A night or two without nightmares of clamps and needles, without staring at the ceiling and feeling her stomach churn at the profound injustice of that facility's existence...

"...I'll talk to Shepard," she eventually decided, her voice a bit more low-key than usual.

"I see. I think you'll find you made the right---"

_Fwoooosh_. The door closed in the middle of his sentence, and Thane was left to his own devices. Jack hurried back to the elevator, practically fleeing to the cargo hold, and typed out a quick message to Shepard, the gist of which was basically _get your ass down here when you have a few minutes_. She chewed a nail, trying to keep down her nerves, and settled back onto the cot to think. Chances were good Shepard would at least respond to the message when morning came, and that gave her a fighting chance. He didn't have any practical reason to head in Pragia's direction, but maybe she could convince him with a little luck. Maybe seeing the base again, derelict and stripped of all the mystery through which a child's eyes had viewed it, would put her mind at ease. Hell, maybe planting a nuke in the middle of it and blowing it to kingdom come would make things even better.

Jack still didn't get any sleep that night, but her mood was a touch better than it had been in the afternoon, and as anyone with her upbringing knew, you took what small victories you could get.


	4. Chapter 4

Mass Effect is the property of Bioware.

**A/N: **Sorry about my wonky updating habits. I'm in the middle of working on my masters thesis, plus two jobs, so things can kinda get out of hand at times. Still, rest assured I'm constantly thinking of where this thing is headed, and how to get there properly (kinda new to the romance thing).

This one has a bit of a cliffhanger. Apologies in advance.

* * *

**Four**

He may have been an unimposing man, able to blend into the background and fade away before your eyes roamed back to him, but Thane's silhouette against the gray Pragia skies, one shoulder propped against the shuttle's open door as his cape rippled in the wind, was a damned impressive sight.

Jack did not notice.

"Shouldn't have come back," she murmured, crossing the shuttle for the eighth time to stare out the window anxiously. "Thinking back on shit that should've stayed buried. This was a bad idea, we could've just blasted it from orbit, dropped a few probes, called it a day..." One hand nervously fiddled with the elaborate piercing on her right ear as she turned to glare at the assassin's back. "How'd you talk me into this again?"

It was a fair question, but regarding the two's presence on the Normandy's shuttle, heading for a derelict Cerberus base in a remote system, the how of their circumstances was somewhat more interesting than the why. Jack hadn't seriously expected Commander Shepard to make a detour to Pragia just for her, and she had been surprised by his ready willingness to make the trip. In fact, she somewhat suspected her erstwhile partner had talked to the commander and encouraged him to do her a favor, despite Shepard's excuse that Pragia neighbored a few resource-rich planets and they could do some mining while the errand was taken care of. This suspicion was further encouraged by the fact that Shepard had sent the assassin with her, ostensibly as backup (more likely, to keep an eye on her).

"I can't say I like it much myself," Krios rasped, his expression pensive. Obsidian eyes peered out at the horizon, watching the rain go by as they drew near the facility. "The air here is...moist. Uncomfortable."

The sentence "Sorry the weather offends your delicate fuckin' _sensibilities_" was very nearly out of her mouth before she remembered Mordin's discreet briefing on Kepral's Syndrome for the squad. It was enough to get Jack to shut up and sit down, and this time it lasted a whole six seconds before she was back up and stalking around the shuttle, fingers nervously flexing and one lip thoroughly chewed. "It's probably not even totally standing these days; I cleared the place out myself when I escaped. Hell, maybe it's fallen over and we can just drop the bomb and go back to the Normandy, no need to even get out..."

The drell shook his head. "Cerberus facilities are usually built to last, as you know. I'll be surprised if this one doesn't have power, let alone structural integrity. You might not have done as much damage as---" At this point, he finally looked back at her, and spent two heartbeats watching her pace before he sighed. "Jack, sit down."

"Maybe I don't wanna sit down," Jack growled back. "Kinda easy for _you_ to be all calm about this, isn't it?"

As always, she completely failed to get a reaction out of him. Krios simply folded his arms, studying her patiently. "You may not believe it now," he said, "but revisiting the facility as it is now will help you. You cannot let it loom over your memories forever and trap your soul in the past; to see it with adult eyes, free of the mindset you grew up with, will demystify it. It's nothing more than a building, and when you've moved past what it represents to you, you will see that."

Well...there wasn't any arguing with that. Hell, it was going to take a moment just to process all of it. Jack slid back onto one of the shuttle's seats, taking the opportunity to look over the bomb again. It was a basic tactical nuclear device, both lightweight and easy to operate. Wouldn't be much of a problem to get it into the facility and arm it, at least.

After securing the bomb again, she spoke up, raising her eyes just enough to meet the drell's. "I don't get you. You keep trying to get in my head, but if it's possible to rattle _you_, I haven't seen it done." Her voice took on just the slightest hint of a challenge. "How the hell would you know the way I'm thinking? You have to have a reason to be so cocksure of yourself."

Save for the engine's steady roar, the shuttle was silent for a while as Krios turned back to watch the clouded skies go by. His dewlap twitched slightly at an unbidden thought, and then, like a dam breaking, a memory burst forth, drawing out an almost undetectable shivering in his shoulders.

_---faint trails of still-warm blood, leading him inexorably into the bedroom. Irikah reaches up for him as he kneels, recognizing him even through unseeing eyes. "It'll be all right," she whispers, delirious, absurdly trying to comfort him in her last moments, as her hand goes limp in his grasp---_

"Experience." His voice was a low hum in the night, barely audible over the engines.

* * *

Foliage had sprung up around the base over time, and a thick network of vines coated the shattered, splayed blast doors. Jack ran a hand over the leaves, distant echoes of thrumming biotic energy and the shriek of bending steel in her mind. "This is the spot," she breathed, more for her sake than Thane's. "Head back the way I came out, and we'll get to my cell."

Krios hefted the bomb, cradling it carefully in one arm, and stepped through what remained of the doors. "That makes sense," he said, glancing around the room, "but will you be able to remember which way you..." The sentence trailed off as his gaze fell on the massive hole gouged into a nearby wall, ringed by rust-colored splatters and piles of debris. "...I see."

"Yeah." Stepping into the center of the room, she turned in a circle and took in her surroundings with a deep, steadying breath. It wasn't so bad, not yet. The facility _was_ clearly empty; there was something vaguely comforting about the silence. No whirr of machinery, no muffled screams from distant hallways. "I came this way the night I broke out. One of the guards left a screw loose when he was changing the battery on my inhibitor, and I managed to get it off. Busted out of the cell, fought my way through everybody else in this hole, and ran off into the night." Jack glanced at one of the particularly large bloodstains almost fondly, remembering the grim satisfaction of ripping the Cerberus team apart. The other test subjects hadn't fared any better; it wasn't like they had any kind of camaraderie with her after all, seeing as how she'd been kept separate from the rest of the children at all times.

"Let's get moving."

The assassin nodded wordlessly and followed along as Jack ducked through the hole in the wall and found herself between a row of glass cubes. A pair of computer terminals at one end of the room jogged her memory as to just what those cubes were for. "Oh. Processing. This was where all the new kids came through. I got to see it once or twice, but they didn't let me in this part of the base unless I had to go through it to get to the operating room."

Crouching next to one of the small cubes, Krios wiped the dust from the glass with the back of a hand. "_Children_ were kept in these?" he asked, with an incredulous lilt to his voice's normal vibrato.

"Two to a cube, usually," she answered. "Most of them were here for a couple hours while all the basic tests were run...blood, skin samples, that kind of thing."

She could swear his lip curled slightly as he rose.

A massive atrium awaited them on the other side of the next door: rows of long-desolate planters and turrets mounted on the walls. A lone catwalk ran across all four walls, bringing to mind the image of Cerberus security, their faces masked behind black-plated helmets and never without their assault rifles, keeping a close eye on the other test subjects as they milled about in the exercise yard. Jack strolled over to the east end of the yard, looking for a familiar ring of barricades. It seemed to have mostly fallen apart over the years, but a few of the concrete barriers still stood, and she climbed onto one, sitting down to stare thoughtfully at the bloodstained floor. A moment later, a rustling noise to her left drew her attention away, and she discovered that Krios had leaned against the barricade and was likewise examining the area. His leathers didn't squeak when he moved, so it was occasionally hard to keep track of him.

Jack's fingers traced idly over the tally marks tattooed on her scalp; she felt a bit more at ease, and the burning tightness in her chest had been gradually dissipating as they explored more of the facility. "It's funny," she said, a bit less brashly than usual. "I guess you were right about this trip being better once I got inside. I kinda expected to freak out the minute I stepped in the door, but...even if it does dredge up some shit I'd rather not remember, it feels like it happened to a whole different person." A little introspection would have brought up the idea that she tended to compartmentalize most trauma (and make no mistake, Jack had seen _far_ more than any person's fair share of trauma) and resort to coping mechanisms, so perhaps it wasn't all that unusual that here, staring straight into the belly of the beast, she was able to engage it on her preferred terms...but then, she was never one for introspection.

The assassin rested his chin on one hand, his eyes roaming over the makeshift arena. It was thoroughly stained, even more so than Jack's trail of destruction so far, to the point that the septic-gray of the facility's floor tiles had all but disappeared under a rusty brownish-red mess. "So were these...also from you?" he asked, phrasing it much more delicately than he could have.

"Lots of them, yeah." She leaned forward, elbows braced against the tops of her knees. "Not from the escape, though: part of the 'conditioning' process. There were more of these barricades set up, and they'd herd some of us out of our cells and get us to fight here. Sometimes I'd see two other kids in here, but it was mostly me and whoever they dragged out to take me on." Her jaw clenched as she remembered the clinical, dissociated tone of the Cerberus logs. "'Conditioning'....it's bullshit, they were turning us into varren. Just fucked-up, obedient little biotic animals, nothing more."

"As a child in the service of the hanar, I often sparred against my classmates," Krios recalled. "It's a useful method of practicing your skills, certainly." After a second look at the sea of dried blood, he clarified further: "But the Illuminated Primacy were concerned with both my skills and my well-being, and it's plain to see that Cerberus had no such concerns for the 'subjects' here." There was an elegantly pronounced distaste in his voice, as if the program's very existence offended him. It was a touch of much-needed reassurance.

Jack nodded slowly, remembering the shock batons and sedatives. "Concern didn't enter into it. I remember," and here she shifted awkwardly, legs gently swinging as she perched on the barricade, "they'd scream 'attack' at me. The researchers, I mean. That's all I ever heard when I was out here. 'Attack, attack, attack.' Like they were trying to drill the word into me...and if I _didn't_ attack, security wrecked my shit and threw me back in there. So yeah, that's the uplifting story of why I feel all nice and warm every time I crush a head with my bare hands."

"What they did to you was reprehensible," the assassin agreed, but then he shifted gears unexpectedly: "Do you think, though, that you're a stronger person for it?"

"Definitely." She hopped down from the concrete slab, turning to face Krios and continuing without hesitation. "It was hell, but I figured if I could survive this, I could get through anything: Omega, Purgatory, the Collectors, whatever. Every scar, every time I got fucked over by people I trusted, every little..._indignity_, they made me into what I am." Jack took a breath, hurrying through the next sentence before she could stop herself. "And I don't regret any of it. I'm pissed off about it, yeah, and I'll make the bastards who did it pay...but I wouldn't take it away if I had the chance."

Something fiery swelled inside her and she clenched a fist, holding it up and charging just enough energy that it glowed a bit. "Shit, it feels weird talking to anybody about all this, but you know what? You _were_ right about coming here, and if the rest of the crew thinks I'm cracking up because I'm admitting it, then fuck 'em. This place, it's done me one hell of a bad turn, but I see now: it's just a building. I've been through it, I've learned everything I need to know from it, and I can't keep living in it anymore." With a flick of her wrist, the bomb leapt into the air and flew towards Jack's outstretched hand; she snagged it by the handle and turned back to the drell, locking eyes. "Whatever this base had over me back then doesn't matter; I'm not that scared little girl anymore. Even if it was a part of me, it's a part I'm ready to leave in the past."

They stood there for a few long seconds, her last words echoing in the empty atrium, and then Krios finally smiled, clasping his hands in front of him. "That was well-said. I take it you feel better now?"

"Fuck yes, I do." Her eyes blazed.

"Good." Straightening, he gestured towards the door. "Let's plant that bomb, then."

* * *

The cell was exactly as she remembered it, save for the layer of dust coating everything in the room. Jack wandered over to the bed, setting the bomb down and stretching out for a moment. "Some nights I dream I'm still in this bed," she said distantly, as Krios moved over to the window. "Back then I'd lie here for hours at a time, trying to figure out a way to get out, wandering what the outside world was like...none of the other kids could've told me, since I never really got to meet them outside of 'conditioning'."

"That's the atrium we were in several minutes ago," the assassin observed. "I don't recall seeing your cell from there, though, so that means..."

"Right, it's a mirror," she answered, and hoisted herself upright again, standing up to cross the room and examine her beloved desk. "Probably a one-way...I remember screaming myself hoarse at the others, trying to get them to look in and notice me. Guess the whole room's soundproof. It'd make sense."

He nodded. "It's a better cell than the others we saw, at least."

"Yeah, only the _best_ for Subject Zero," Jack snorted, her voice dripping sarcasm. "Couldn't make their precious little prototype _uncomfortable_ in between the beatings and the operations."

Ruminating on this, he picked up the bomb from beside the bed, carried it over to the center of the room, and opened the interface. "Would you prefer to arm it?" he offered. "You have the detonator, after all."

Jack remained stationary, though, and as the vigor in her began to slowly cool, she eyed the drell thoughtfully. "Be straight with me here, Krios: what's your angle in this?"

His outer eyelids blinked as he looked up from the bomb. "How do you mean?"

"Don't jerk me around here," she ordered, her tone lowering just a little menacingly. "Look, I feel a hell of a lot better, and I owe you one for this, but...shit, we barely _know_ each other. I haven't done a thing for you, and you know full well I don't give a pyjack's ass about anybody. What are you looking to get?"

He stood, noble and rigid, rms folded. "I have to admit I'm partly doing this for myself," the assassin confessed. "Considering the things I've seen and done, adversity such as yours tends to spur me to action out of empathy. Besides, you're part of my team. Adversity," he quoted, "brings men together, and produces both beauty and harmony in life's relationships. Kierkegaard."

A moment's pause passed by as she thought this through, and then finally Jack smirked, the proverbial light bulb seeming to come on in her head. She tossed her pistol on the bed, stalking towards Krios in easy, fluid steps, and he must've caught the look in her eye, because he actually backed up as she approached. "Hell, that wasn't so hard," she grinned, closing the distance with alarming speed. "Look, you're pretty easy on the eyes, Krios. You didn't have to play therapist; if this was about sex, maybe you could've just fuckin' _said so_."

It was the first time she'd seen him flustered. Both eyelids blinked rapidly for a second, and he came to a halt a second later because he'd backed up straight into a wall. "It's not," he managed, even though she was on him in an instant, pinning his wrists against the wall and pressing her body up against his. The drell was warm, surprisingly so for a reptilian species, and his muscles were packed tight under his scales, providing her with a nice hard frame to sidle up against

Jack pressed her lips against the assassin's throat, her teeth nibbling roughly at his dewlap, and ground her hips up against his, finally drawing a sharp breath out of him. She was vaguely aware of his timbrous voice as he breathed "Jack, listen to me, this isn't---", but the vibrations of his throat against her tongue only spurred her on harder. Her fingers interlaced with his, keeping his hands secured at the wall, as her mouth trailed from his neck down to the front of his chest, gripping the zipper to his coat firmly between her teeth. He was all hers, and she knew it as she dipped low, dragging the zipper down the front of his coat, unwrapping the drell like a birthday present---

---and then it seemed he'd finally regained control of his faculties, because the next thing she knew, a biotic field was pushing her away firmly. Jack, who wasn't expecting it at all, landed unceremoniously on her ass and had to scramble back to a standing position while Thane, who looked totally out of sorts at this point, fumbled with the zipper until it was back to its original position.

"Okay, _what the fuck_, Krios?!" she growled, hands on her hips and looking about two stops short of punching him. "The hell was that supposed to be?"

He was definitely flustered. It took a moment for the drell to get his reply together, hands still messing with the zipper all the way. "I...wasn't expecting that," he managed, sounding a bit less than collected for once. "It wasn't my intent to...to try to extort anything from you."

Jack threw her hands up, pacing back to the bomb with annoyance. "I don't get you," she sighed after a few seconds of frustrated, muttered curses. "You don't want to throw the cheerleader out the airlock, you don't want to fuck, you don't want to go start a brawl in Afterlife, you don't want _anything_. But you keep coming around, being all friendly, trying to help me out, doing the therapist thing like Shepard keeps trying. Throw me something here, Krios, because I'm not seeing what you're after."

"I'm not _after_ anything," he began, starting to relax a bit again. "It isn't that I'm trying to get something out of you by helping."

"_Everybody_ wants something," she snapped back, pointing a finger. "It's not gonna fly with me, all right? People only get in close because you've got something they want, or so they don't need the knife to be as long. So spill."

Distantly, the _whoosh_ of a door echoed in the cell block hallway.

Krios clasped his hands, cracking his knuckles with some apparent frustration of his own. "Jack," he explained, "listen. I've built up a number of regrets in my time...some of the greatest mistakes of my life, in fact. I know my days are numbered, and in the little time I have left, there's no way I can make up for those regrets." As his collected, elegant air began to settle back into place, he spread his hands and continued. "The last thing I want is to see anyone else end up like me: at the end of the road, always looking back, consumed over what could have been---what _should_ have been. You had a chance to put this facility behind you, to take joy in what you are instead of what you were, or what you could have been if things were different...and I wanted you to take that chance. You've got a long life ahead of you still, and you don't need to spend it dwelling on Cerberus with no time for yourself. That's why I wanted to help."

It was dead silent for a full fifteen seconds after he finished speaking, during which Jack chewed rather ferociously on her lower lip, one fist clenched at her side, and glowered at the assassin. The wheels were clearly turning inside her head, his words repeating themselves to her, and finally..._finally_...her shoulders dropped slightly, cheeks reddening very slightly in what the assassin could have sworn was either shame, embarrassment, or a little of both.

"Look, I...ah, fuck," she said half-heartedly, sounding a bit defeated. "Okay, maybe I believe you. I don't want to, but....look, you know I'm not good at the soft shit. I didn't mean to, uh...well, I guess I didn't exactly live up to---"

_Whooosh_. This time it was very loud, and both of their heads turned towards the door. Several sets of heavy footsteps were heading straight down the hallway towards them, and at the rate the sound was approaching, they'd be in the cell in a matter of seconds.

Thane reached into his coat, drawing a pair of pistols. "Grab your gun," he ordered, motioning towards the bed. "It sounds like we have company."

* * *

**To be continued...**


	5. Chapter 5

Mass Effect is the property of Bioware.

* * *

**Five**

Reaction time is one of the most important factors in a combat situation. As far back as civilization goes, fights have regularly been decided by who thinks fast enough to draw first. Unlike in vids, where a single gunfight can go as long as half an hour, real life shootouts tend to last under five minutes and boil down almost entirely to cover and reaction time.

Due in no small part to the very facility they were standing in, Jack's reaction time was _superb_.

Despite her frustration at the conversation they'd been having, she reacted almost instantly, diving towards the bed as soon as Thane spoke. The pistol was lying next to a pillow, and as she snagged it and racked the slide, a twinge of annoyance at not bringing her shotgun came to mind. Hell, the base was supposed to be deserted; they'd only brought pistols out of consideration that wild animals might have gotten in over the years. On the other hand, nothing ever went right, and Jack was beginning to think that she really should've caught on to this by now.

When the doors slid open, she was not entirely surprised to see a pair of vorcha and a crimson-armored krogan. Blood Pack, most likely, trying to get some salvage. At least there were only three of them; that meant she and Krios were outnumbered, but he was probably lining up a shot already---

--or he had disappeared. Jack blinked, scanning the room in the half-second she had left, and caught a glimpse of the assassin on the ceiling. He'd braced himself above the door by doing a split against the walls, and was perched over the Blood Pack with pistols in hand.

Apparently, the krogan was as surprised to see Jack as she was to see him. "What the--" he exclaimed, and then that was pretty much the end of cordial greetings, because she put four rounds in the vorcha to the left and dove behind the bed for cover. Jack's target gurgled out a mouthful of blood, slumping against the wall, but the other vorcha let out a feral shriek and charged across the room at her, spraying wildly. The krogan followed, but a black and green blur from above dropped onto his head and knocked him to the ground, taking him out of the equation for the moment.

"Eat your bones!" the vorcha hissed, firing off another burst of gunfire. Its shots abruptly died, and Jack picked up the sound of a frustrated snarl and the click of a heatsink; that was her cue to attack. Rather than popping up and squeezing off a few uncertain shots, she reached out with her biotics and wrenched at the two-way mirror on the wall. The glass split down the middle with a screech, and Jack pulled hard, dislodging half of it altogether, then heaved everything she had into one good throw. Straight as an arrow, the mirror shard rocketed across the room, straight over Thane's head (he had the wisdom to wait until it had passed over to kip up and continue with the krogan), and sheared straight through the vorcha's waist. Its top half fell over, screaming and cursing, while the legs took several comically hesitant steps and toppled.

The assassin, having leapt back to his feet once the glass was out of his way, was holding his own admirably. His dynamic entry into the fight had caused the krogan's assault rifle to go clattering out of his hands and across the floor, and as the lizard rose to grab it, he fired off a single shot, knocking it back out of arm's length. With a furious bellow, the krogan charged, clearly intent on smearing his drell opponent into the wall with momentum alone. Unfazed, Krios leapt at him, turning three graceful rotations in midair, and planted a picture-perfect roundhouse kick in the krogan's jaw, sending him staggering back on weak knees. The drell landed on one knee, spinning back into an upright position, and fired off a point-blank shot through the eye as he rose, then two more for good measure. Stumbling back, the huge mercenary grabbed onto the edge of the table for support, and Krios unloaded the rest of both magazines into his face and crest, at which point he crashed through the table and landed flat on his back, stone dead.

Jack was impressed, but there was no time for banter; the vorcha she had shot in the hallway had already regenerated. Indeed, her bullets were falling out of his muscles and clanging against the floor as he raised his rifle to take a shot at Thane. With a growl, she launched a biotic shockwave at him, popping the thug up into the air, whereupon she promptly shot him two more times, snagged him out of the air, and slammed him into the ground headfirst. The sound of the creature's spine practically fragmenting itself was reassurance enough that it wouldn't be regenerating anytime soon.

The room was silent again.

"Well, that was different," Krios mused, straightening his collar. He kept an eye on the krogan, just in case the merc pulled one of his race's famous regenerating tricks, and stepped back to the center of the room to take in the whole situation. "Are you all right?"

"Been worse," Jack demurred. Folding her arms, she studied the downed krogan, only looking down when something clawed at her ankles. It seemed the bisected vorcha's top half had managed to crawl over to her, and was currently clutching at her legs, choking out curses through a mouthful of blood. Well, she had to admire the thing's spirit, not that admiration stopped her from bringing a boot down on its head. "Blood Pack, looks like," she said, raising her voice a bit to be heard over the wet crunch of vorcha skull. "I guess they were after the salvage.'

Unexpectedly, a voice spoke up from the hallway. "They were here because I brought them."

The pair raised their guns, keeping them trained on the entrance. "Show yourself," Thane ordered. "Move into the light slowly, and don't make any sudden movements."

Jack gestured with the barrel of her pistol. "Probably looking for a way to finish the job. I say we waste the fucker."

"I'm unarmed; you don't have anything to fear from me," the man said hastily, moving forward into the light. He was a nondescript human, probably somewhere around Jack's age by the look of him, with nothing particularly notable about him. There was no Blood Pack insignia on his jumpsuit (and Jack smacked herself a second later for even entertaining the idea; he was a _human_, of course he wasn't in the Blood Pack), and true to his word, he didn't seem to have any weapons. Still, his men had fired on the two of them, and that was more than enough of an excuse to classify the new guy as a very dead man.

"So what, you hired them?" she demanded, not taking her aim off him. "Come to scavenge some Cerberus tech?"

"No, nothing like that," he insisted. "They were here for protection, in case varren had overrun the place. I thought, since it had been a few years, it'd be smart to bring security."

Something was oddly familiar about his voice, his demeanor. Jack's long eyelashes fluttered as she blinked once, then twice in rapid succession. "I know you," she said hesitantly, feeling a bit foolish almost as the words left her mouth. Even if she did know him, where the hell had they met? He didn't look like the criminal type, and she couldn't remember shooting it out with him, so...hmm. It was on the tip of her mind, a hazy image from the past, and Jack couldn't quite bring it out and give it a name.

"Have you met before, then?" Thane asked, stepping forward. He had lowered his weapon, but maintained a suspicious eye on the newcomer, muscles tensed and ready should anything unexpected happen again.

The man shook his head. "No, not that I recall. I can't remember seeing..."

Their eyes met.

"...wait." Three slow seconds passed. "........_Subject Zero?_"

Jack _dove_ at him.

For all his famed speed and reflexes, Krios barely managed to raise a hand in an effort to stop her, and almost before he could finish blinking, Jack had vaulted the dead krogan and plowed into the man, bringing them both to the ground. She had him pinned without much of a struggle (especially considering the initial impact had knocked the wind out of him) and, with the murderous look on her face that Thane had come to know all too well, was pressing the business end of her pistol against the man's eye socket.

Over the month or so that they'd been acquainted, he'd learned how to tell when Jack was just giving lip service to her image and when she was seriously, cataclysmically pissed off. To wit: if she screamed at you, she was ready to kill you, but if she was quiet, she was ready to kill _everything_, and Jack's voice was very, _very_ quiet as she leaned close to her squirming captive. "You're with Cerberus, then? Were you one of the researchers here?" Most of his panicked mewling was unintelligible, meaning she only got angrier. "_Tell me_."

"Jack..." Krios began, easing towards her.

"No! No, I'm not with Cerberus!" The man thrashed, trying to get out from under the gun's barrel, and elicited a growl and another jab with the pistol. He took the hint and settled down enough to talk coherently. "I...my name's Aresh, I was...I _am_....Subject Five."

Oh.

….OH.

Jack blinked, slowly pulling the gun away. She studied Aresh for the first time, her gaze picking out surgical scars along his neck, the telltale criss-cross of a biotic implant on one temple. It made sense; she hadn't recognized him beyond a twinge of familiarity after all those years.

"The night the riots broke out, I was the only person who survived," Aresh continued, visibly relaxing a bit now that he wasn't staring death in the face. "One of the walls in the atrium exploded...I guess that was you...and a chunk of debris knocked me out. When I woke up, a Cerberus patrol found me and took me offworld; apparently I'd been unconscious for almost two days."

"That doesn't explain why you're here." Jack stood, carefully climbing off Subject Five (_no, Aresh_, she reminded herself), and took a step back to eye him thoughtfully. "Were you trying to steal the test data? Why would you come back after all those years?"

A snort. "You of all people are going to ask that? You're _standing right there_."

Her eyes dropped, and Jack felt her cheeks burn as she shifted a bit in place. He had a point; she'd come back too.

"You should know better than anybody else," Aresh continued, sitting up and hugging his knees to his chest. "This place, it...it stays with me. I close my eyes, and I'm back in the cell, listening to the other kids screaming out in the corridor. I'm always dreaming of needles, scalpels, shock batons...chemicals burning in my veins, men in white coats typing out my vitals on datapads." He rocked back and forth, pushing against his temples with white-knuckled hands. "Even during the day, I can't go into crowds or I just freeze up, thinking about the conditioning room. 'Attack, attack, attack.' It's...it's too much." With his jaw clenched and eyes squeezed shut, he quivered in place.

Krios spoke up. "It seems you weren't the only one who was drawn back here," he observed, pacing towards the two with elegant, minced steps. "Aresh...we're here to destroy this base. You should come with us, cast off everything it represents. Take the same steps Jack's making, and it'll be better for you in the long run."

"Destroy it?" The man was agape.

With a nod, Jack waved in the bomb's direction. "Gonna blow it the fuck up," she agreed with a cheerfully satisfied leer in her voice. "Can't haunt either of us when it's smoking rubble---"

"What? No, no, that's not what..." Aresh clawed at the sides of his head, stammering through the sentence. "I'm not trying to destroy the base. I hired those mercs so we could rebuild it."

For exactly one-fourth of a second after his sentence ended, you could've heard a pin drop, and then all hell broke loose.

Far too many things were going on at once. Jack's pistol was back out and trained between Aresh's eyes as she stormed forward, shouting at him; the smaller man was backpedaling frantically, scrambling backwards with his arms in an attempt to put some distance between the two of them.

"Rebuild it?" Jack screamed, launching him across the room with a biotic warp. "You're going to start this back up? What the fuck kind of Stockholm Syndrome bullshit is this? After everything they did, you're going to...." The sentence trailed off into an unintelligible roar as she actually fired a shot, though Aresh had rolled over just in time to avoid taking the slug right in his ribs.

Thane took a step towards the rampaging convict, laying a hand on her shoulder. "Jack, calm down---"

"You know as well as I did what they put us through!" Aresh yelled back, raising his hands plaintively. "There must've been a reason for it! An end they were trying to reach!"

Any hope that Thane had of subduing the situation seemed pretty much lost at this point, as Jack shoved past him and, eschewing biotics altogether, kicked Aresh in the side of the head. The man sprawled across the ground, trying to crawl away from her in a daze. "What the hell kind of goal is going to justify what they did?" she shouted, and gave him another kick in the ribs for good measure. "Nothing! Nothing excuses this! You're not going to give them a free ride just because they tortured us trying to build some kind of super soldier!"

"_Trying_? Look at you!" To Aresh's credit, he was clearly terrified, but not incoherent and certainly not incapable of yelling right back at Jack. "They succeeded! You're not even normal for a biotic, you're some kind of superhuman! Other people deserve---"

That was it. Her boot clamped down on his throat, reducing the rest of the rant into choked gasps. Standing over her downed compatriot, Jack pointed the pistol, drawing it level with his head. "Nobody deserves what happened to us," she answered, her voice tapering down to an eerie calm. "It doesn't matter what you or I got out of it; _nothing_ is worth those years." One hand reached down and racked the slide back. "Shit, I guess we're both gonna end up as things we never wanted to be. I'm superhuman, and you're a _corpse_."

In turning her back on the assassin, Jack had made the same mistake as many of his victims; she sure as hell hadn't noticed him moving over the last few seconds, or even heard his footsteps. And yet, before she could squeeze the trigger, Krios was right there. _Right there_, as in up against her back, one hand reached out and grasping the gun's barrel.

"Don't." The word was exceptionally close, and she could feel the drell's breath on her ear, warm and dry.

Jack took a slow breath, trying to maintain her composure amidst the wildfire raging in her head. "Krios, I owe you one for this," she managed shakily, "but I'm gonna need you to fuck off. I'm shooting this bastard and you're not stopping me."

"You don't need to shoot him," Thane insisted gently, maintaining his grip on the gun. "Don't bring yourself down to that level."

"He's going to restart the program! I'm not letting that happen."

She could feel his heartbeat between her shoulderblades, slow, rhythmic, reassuring. "He's not going to restart the program because we're destroying the base. Put the gun down, Jack." The hand on her pistol's barrel began to carefully ease it downwards.

"Why the fuck do you care?" she snapped, keeping it pointed at Aresh. "You've got a bodycount the size of mine; why does it matter so much to you if I waste this asshole or not?"

"The measure of an individual," Krios murmured, "can be difficult to determine through actions alone. Just because you _can_ kill doesn't mean you _have_ to, Jack. He's part of your past, part of this place...let it go. There are plenty of better things to focus on."

Deep brown eyes narrowed. "Easier to move on from him when he's got a smoking hole in his head."

"Jack, listen to me." His sonorant voice was low, calm, but at the same time there was a vague undercurrent of urgency. "If you kill him, you'll be falling right back into the loop. Don't let your past dictate who you are." The fingers of Thane's other hand settled lightly on her opposite arm, their scales smooth against her flesh. "You're not merely a product of your environment, Jack, and you're not a bad person. Don't fall back into what Cerberus wanted for you."

For a long, agonized moment, Jack stared down the pistol's sights, one finger trembling against the trigger.

_...and you're not a bad person_.

Another twitch would be all it took. Just one little squeeze and that was it for Aresh.

_Not a bad person_.

Her vision blurred momentarily, washing out the room in a stinging, wet haze, and she furiously blinked it away...but her arm relaxed and lowered the gun, nice and easy, letting Krios lift it gently from her hand.

"Fuck," she hissed, lips pulled taut in a rictus-like grimace. "_Fuck_. Like hell I'm not."

"You just showed you weren't," he answered, carefully stepping back from Jack so as not to crowd her, but keeping a guiding hand on her shoulder. "We've done what we came here to do...why don't you head back to the shuttle? I'll go ahead and arm the bomb, and then you can set it off when we leave."

Jack felt like she was about to pass out. The stress of the last few minutes had left her feeling lightheaded as hell, and she needed to find a spot to sit down. "...All right." A couple tentative steps led her to the door, which she passed through as soon as it whooshed open, resisting the temptation to look back at the cell in which she'd spent her entire childhood. _Let it go...let it go_.

As the door shut behind her, she found that just a little of the tension had already begun to dissipate.

* * *

"That," Thane said, moving towards the bomb and turning the key to begin the arming sequence, "was the most impressive display of self-control I think I've ever seen out of her. It took everything in her not to shoot you."

Aresh coughed, both hands kneading at his abused throat. "I...I don't know how you managed that." His voice squeaked a bit, and his fingers shook, belying the scare he'd just been given. "I thought for sure, when I saw the look in her eyes..."

The drell nodded, pressing a final button and watching with satisfaction as a green LED lit up on the bomb's side. "She was prepared to finish the job, yes." His lip curled in a half-smile; bit of an understatement, that.

"But she didn't," the man continued, staring wide-eyed at him. "You talked her down. She _listened_ to you, and hell, she doesn't seem like the kind of person to listen to anyone." He rubbed idly at the side of his neck, studying Thane's movements, and his mouth quirked slightly to one side. "So are you...wait, is she...um. Are you two _involved_? From the way she backed down when you told her, I thought..."

Thane blinked. What the hell kind of a question was this?!

"Er..."

_--feral strength pins his wrists beside him, smooth, plump lips running along his throat. He protests meaninglessly, ineffectually, but her hips insinuate themselves against his and something within him _stirs_; deep brown eyes in the instant before he pushes her away, bearing something positively primal--_

"...I...no," he finally answered, crossing the room to stand behind Aresh, who had finally pulled himself up to one knee. "But she's troubled, and I want her to recover, to know what it feels like to be whole again. I could not let your blood stain her hands so soon after she realized she had a chance at a new life."

"Well, I'm glad you did," Aresh said. He swallowed hard, wincing slightly; there would certainly be bruises (in the shape of a heel mark, appropriately enough). "Look, I'd better go meet up with the Blood Pack so we can--"

A strong hand gripped him under the jaw, and as he turned to protest, another steadied the back of his head.

"My hands, however, are already stained enough." The assassin's rich voice had dropped to a somber tone, almost regretful. "And I can't let you rebuild this base. What happened here must never be repeated, to _anyone_."

"Wait, what?! What are you---"

"May you find peace beneath the wings of Kalihira."

Thane twisted sharply, and the crack of vertebrae was deafening in the empty cell.

* * *

It was much later that evening that Jack found herself on a couch in the crew lounge, idly pretending to watch the holo with a few squadmates. Her chin rested on her knees, which she'd hugged to her chest in a gesture oddly reminiscent of Aresh...fitting, as she hadn't stopped thinking about that trip all day. The idle thoughts were less insistent, though, and considering that the Pragia base was a pile of burning rocks now, maybe she'd be able to get a little rest every now and then. Probably a crazy thing to hope for, but hey, a girl could dream.

The holo screen depicted a batarian mercenary, his rifle having been shot across the room, slumped against a wall with an armored hanar training three guns at once on him. "What...what kind of hanar can wipe out an entire platoon?" he exclaimed, all four eyes wide. "Who the hell are you?"

"This one's face name is Blastophanes," the hanar answered, "but the criminal scum may refer to this one as Blasto, or more appropriately as _your most intense terror-induced delusion_."

Zaeed roared with laughter, slapping his knee. "Best goddamn show in the galaxy!" he chortled. Next to him, Grunt, who had started off somewhat skeptical about the show's premise, cracked a grin as well.

Jack wasn't really paying much attention to the holo. It had been a hell of a day, all things considered...and she had a lot to think about. Pragia, Cerberus, Aresh, herself, Krios---

--speak of the devil. There he was, at the other end of the lounge, leaning all casual and devil-may-care against the Tupari machine. She'd started getting used to his inhumanly stealthy entrances and exits, but no amount of experience would make it less jarring that he showed up right as she'd been thinking about him. Kind of a creepy coincidence.

Their eyes met, and he beckoned with one hand. Jack glanced over to see if anybody would notice her leaving the couch; as she suspected, Zaeed and Grunt were focused on the holo. "All right," the mercenary proclaimed, "this is the best part right here..."

"I don't know nothin', jellyfish!" the batarian was shouting, having been pinned against the wall by a tentacle since the last time Jack had looked at the screen. "Nothin', I tell you!"

"This one is a Citadel Spectre," retorted the hanar, slamming him (slowly) against the wall. "_A Citadel Spectre_. This one doesn't have time for your solid waste excretions."

Jack crossed the room, the uproarious laughter of human and krogan alike drifting along behind her, and ambled over to the vending machine. She slowed to a halt in front of the drell and said "I--" at exactly the same time he began with "When--"

Both of them paused.

"I'll go first," she declared, in absolutely no mood for the you-go-first game. "Look, Krios, I owe you. I don't know what the fuck you want out of me, but know this---you did right by me today, better than anybody's done in years, and I always pay off what I owe. So let me know when you think of something...the sooner the better, because I don't like owing people." With that, she took a deep breath and folded her arms, waiting for the drell to say his piece.

"...Actually," he began, speaking slowly enough that Jack was fairly sure he was going out of his way to carefully choose his words, "I wanted to discuss that with you...or at least something related. Earlier, when you...misinterpreted my motives, I wanted to apologize for the shove. I hadn't intended to be so forceful, you simply startled me."

Oh, _that_. Jack felt her ears burning at the thought. "Yeah, I....shit, my bad," she mumbled. "Didn't mean to freak you out, it's just...it's what I'm used to, from the kinda people I usually run with. So, uh...sorry."

"No, it's fine," Thane assured her. "I understand you completely. A reasonable mistake."

"Right."

"Certainly."

"No hard feelings."

"None."

"Gotcha."

"Indeed."

They fidgeted for a small eternity, an awkward silence backdropped with gunfire and explosions from the holo.

"So," Thane finally asked, speaking at a somewhat faster pace than she was used to, "since you don't like owing people, would you perhaps care to pay off that debt tomorrow? The Commander's declared three days of shore leave when we dock at the Citadel in the morning, and while I enjoy my meditations, it would be nice not to spend the entire period in solitude."

Jack blinked. It took a moment for her to really process the thought, and she considered its implications. He wasn't _stupid_, and he certainly wasn't naïve. Surely he knew, even as stoic and withdrawn as he tended to be...

...well, what the hell. "Yeah...sounds good," she said with a slow nod, sizing the drell up carefully. "What's a few days off between, uh..." Finding herself at a bit of an impasse, she chewed a lip. "Krios, what the hell are we?"

He coughed, turning to lean against the machine with a different shoulder. "...Friends?"

After a second's consideration, Jack folded her arms and raised an eyebrow. "Fair enough. First one I've had in about three years."

"Ten here," Thane countered, a light smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth.

"Yeah, yeah, don't go turning it into a dick-waving contest," she growled, a sardonic grin showing that she was (mostly) joking. "Well, so that's settled. 'Friends?', with a capital F and a question mark." With that, she turned and started back towards the couch.

"A question mark?" he called after her, either bemused or puzzled (his tone made it impossible to tell which).

"Hey, you said it that way, not me," Jack called over her shoulder. "I like it that way, though. Gives it a little _ambiguity_." Without another word, she hopped onto the couch and turned back to the holo, not bothering to look back as Thane disappeared back down the hallway.

"It is advisable to tell this one where the bomb can be located, or else this one will apply another dose of Minagen Z."

Jack's expression as she watched the hanar's antics was one of amusement, but it was entirely possible that the half-grin on her face was caused by a totally different source from Zaeed and Grunt's laughter.


	6. Chapter 6

Mass Effect is the property of Bioware.

* * *

**Six**

For Thane, Wednesday mornings had a bit of a ritual to them. He would rise and acquire a fresh pot of coffee at the mess hall, as always, then head over to the observation deck and spend an hour with Samara before everybody else woke up and went about their routine.

The Asari justicar was, considering the crew, probably the person most like him on the ship. Stoic, long-lived (though admittedly far so than he), a follower of an honor-centric tradition, and deeply spiritual. Neither one was terribly prone to engage in unwanted talking either, and indeed, sometimes most of the hour would pass by in total silence, with the two of them silently praying together: for the mission, for the commander, for themselves (because if anybody needed it, Thane reasoned, he did, and the justicar seemed to feel the same way about herself). They would not have been friends in private life, certainly; if she had seen him eliminating one of his marks, they would have been obliged to fight. But the two respected each other, and they could relate easily enough under the circumstances, and for Thane, that was enough.

They'd become familiar enough with each other that when Samara began the day's conversation with "Something is on your mind," he was not at all surprised.

"It is." With practice care, he filled a steaming mug for the asari and passed it across the bench to her. "I've been a bit distracted lately," Thane admitted as he poured some of the coffee for himself. "I should be focusing on preparation for the mission, admittedly, but until we discover a means of getting through that relay, my mind has been wandering."

"The criminal," she stated, punctuating it with a sip from her mug. It was not a question.

Shifting uncomfortably, the assassin nodded. "Is it that obvious?"

Pale blue eyes measured him over the rim of the mug. "There have been...rumors." Samara was an affable enough person, and generally pleasant to talk to (or at, if you just needed a sympathetic ear), but her eyes were like a shark's: frigid, calculating, almost predatory. One look in them always, _always_ reminded you of what she was.

Thane sighed. "I suppose that was to be expected."

"It was," she agreed. "It's my understanding that the yeoman witnessed her entering your room several nights ago, and then with the two of you taking on an away mission together...well. Some of the crew have drawn conclusions."

Ever the proper gentleman, Thane decided not to attempt an imitation of the asari's piercing gaze, and instead rested his chin on his steepled hands, leaving his coffee alone for the moment. "Would it offend you if I asked if you were one of them?"

"Not at all," Samara answered graciously, her expression softening a bit. "And no, if you were wondering, I am not. As you know, however, Ms. Chambers has a rather loose idea of confidentiality, and an idle ship between missions is liable to speculate."

"I appreciate your honesty." Not that he would've expected anything else.

A few minutes passed between them in silence, during which Samara reached for the coffee pot. Thane got to it first and refilled her mug, earning a murmured thanks, then finally spoke up again: "What do you think I should do?"

"That depends," the asari answered, pausing maddeningly to take another drink, "on the nature of your intentions, I suppose."

"I want to help her." That much he could unequivocally state. "She's damaged."

"_Everyone_ on this ship is damaged," Samara answered with a wry smile.

"You don't seem to be."

She quieted abruptly, gaze dropping to examine the coffee, and Thane had the impression he'd disconcerted the justicar. After a moment, he continued: "I think we've made progress; she seems to be more at peace, and she's made some decisions of which I'm proud." Taking a sip from his coffee, he paused to savor the bittersweet taste on his tongue before swallowing. "Still...judging from our conversations, she seems to think I have all the answers she's looking for. I don't want to let her down."

"While that is understandable," the asari began, raising her eyes back to his, "she is not a child. Jack and I have not spoken much, but I sense that experience has left her well aware of the imperfection within us all. She will not think less of you if she learns that you, too, have regrets." Her fingers tapped at the side of the mug; they were lithe and tapered, more characteristic of a musician than an inexorable force of justice. "Who knows? Perhaps she might be able to help _you_ in return. The two of you have very different skill sets, after all."

"You may be right," Thane admitted. He flexed a hand, studying the muscles shifting under his scales, and thinking the situation over. "Thank you for lending perspective on this, Samara. I confess I haven't had to interact with others much over the last decade, and my social skills aren't all they should be."

Samara raised her mug in a half-salute. "I am in no position to judge."

"Fair enough." He smiled, and raised the mug to his lips to take another sip.

"Do you have designs on her, Thane?"

Skills honed by decades of gracefully-performed assassinations, hours spent keeping a rifle steady, and countless close-quarters battles where the wrong move meant death just _barely_ kept Thane from choking on the coffee.

"Designs?" he managed, gulping down a painfully hot mouthful and feeling, for the second time in an unacceptably short period, somewhat flustered.

"I don't mean to imply that you would try something...untoward," the justicar said, and although her face betrayed no amusement at his reaction, the shark eyes twinkled ever-so-slightly. "You have become closer to her than anyone else on the Normandy, though, and neither of you are at all unattractive, if I may be so bold. It is not an unreasonable conclusion."

Thane rose, setting down his cup, and navigated toward one end of the table to lean against it while he spoke. "I suppose that's true. I...to be truthful with you, I hadn't given that kind of thing any thought since losing my wife." He ran a hand absently over the underside of his chin, right around the spot her lips had been. "As it stands, though, even if I did, I'm afraid Jack would misinterpret it. From all I've seen of her so far, experience has made her suspicious of any friendly gestures...even when I helped her with the Cerberus base, she seemed like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop."

"She has likely been taken advantage of, on the occasions that she let her guard down," Samara conjectured behind him. "I would guess that after the first few times, those occasions have been very rare."

"I've gotten the occasional glimpse under the surface," the assassin agreed, "but only rarely. I think, if I were patient about it, and we were both interested, we might be able to...foster a relationship of some sort. Still, Jack is volatile; it's difficult to read her."

He could hear the clink of a mug against the table, and a chair scraping lightly on the floor; seconds later, Samara made her way over to an adjacent bench, sitting down to face him. "Has she made overtures?" the asari asked. "She doesn't seem like the type to be indirect about what she wants."

Thane coughed, trying to avoid triggering any memories. "She has." He spoke again, quickly, before the justicar could make any assumptions. "Apparently she thought I expected it, in return for helping her with the facility. I disabused her of that notion."

"A good choice." Samara pursed her lips, eyeing the drell thoughtfully. "You would be wise not to play into her expectations if you wish her to respect you. Beyond that, though, is she interested?"

"I'm not sure," he confessed. "We did tentatively agree to be friends, though---no, 'Friends?' with a question mark." After a pause, he added, "And a capital F," just in case that had some feminine significance that the asari would be able to pick up on.

She blinked. "A question mark?"

"She said it provided ambiguity. I'm not sure if that indicates a desire to---"

"...Thane, she is interested."

A moment passed in silence.

"....I see." Clearing his throat, Thane clasped his hands atop one thigh and looked up to face Samara. "What would you suggest, then?" His tone had taken on the clipped, businesslike air he used for discussing a mark with his client; this kind of thing was much easier to tackle if he kept it in familiar territory.

"It has been centuries since I sought out the company of other," the justicar admitted, "so I may not be the best source of advice. Perhaps you should start with the basics; we do have a shore leave beginning this afternoon, after docking at the Citadel."

"Yes. We have made plans to spend the day seeing the sights." The drell reached back, retrieving both mugs and the coffee pot. "It has been some time since I visited the Citadel...hopefully there will not be any problems."

"I am certain it will go well," Samara said reassuringly, patting him on the arm. "She does not trust easily, as you say, but perhaps having someone to be open with will be good for both of you."

He rose, acknowledging the possibility with a nod. "Perhaps. Thank you, Samara; you've been invaluable." Maybe it was a good idea to come up with something to do on the Citadel before Jack woke up.

* * *

That plan was doomed, because Jack had already woken up. As Thane discussed the situation with Samara halfway across the deck, the tattooed convict was stretched lazily across the same couch as the previous night, watching the same holo. This time, however, it was with rather different company, and an equally different choice of subject matter.

The visit to Illium had several repercussions on the crew: first and foremost was the addition of two new squadmates, obviously. Beyond that, however, Miranda had gotten some business taken care of, Shepard's power trio had reunited with an old friend of theirs, and (most relevant to the present situation) the Commander had returned to the ship with a newly-purchased Gamestation 2000. The cheerleader had, of course, thrown a fit about proper use of Cerberus funding, until Shepard revealed that he had bought the system with his personal funds, in the interest of keeping morale high. Tali'Zorah had spent an afternoon figuring out the byzantine diagrams that showed how to hook the console up to a holo, and since then, it had been in use regularly by the squad, particularly Archangel, who had taken a liking to the occasional rampage in Grim Terminus Alliance.

"You know, Jack, I'm starting to see what you enjoyed about the whole criminal thing," he chuckled, guiding his heavily-armed turian avatar into a digital representation of the Afterlife nightclub.

Jack rolled her eyes, though the gesture was wasted, given that he wasn't looking at her. "It's a little less glamorous in real life," she said, wondering whether that qualified as the understatement of the century.

"Yeah, I guess you're right. The vids made C-Sec look a lot more appealing than it was, too."

"Therix, my cousin!" shouted a turian on the screen, embracing the protagonist. "Let's go dancing!"

The other non-Shepard third of the power trio was reclining in a chair next to them, watching the game with amused interest. "For someone who's so keen on justice, Garrus, you certainly took well to playing a criminal mastermind."

"It's just a game, Tali. Fun to roleplay how the other half lives," he answered, in his normal affable tone. They were technically on different sides of the morality spectrum, but Jack didn't mind the turian too much. He was laid-back as hell, and easy enough to get along with. Plus, he and the quarian didn't like Cerberus.

Now a third figure had joined Therix and his relative: a volus with a set of heavy gold chains around the neck of his enviro-suit. "Listen up, Palaven-clan," he wheezed. "I've got two hundred kilos of red sand that I need to offload, and I want you to smuggle them to my contact on Illium."

Jack snorted. "Red sand's _legal_ on Illium."

"Maybe he doesn't want to pay the tariffs."

"Or _maybe_ it's a trap." The quarian tapped a spindly finger on the side of her helmet. "You're playing a criminal, after all."

"You're not going to trust the volus?" Garrus asked, his voice filled with mock-indignation. "He has a _gold chain_; how could he be untrustworthy?"

"You'll find him out behind the loading docks," the digital volus said. "He's an elcor, you can't miss him. Oh, uh, he gets paranoid about Illium security, so make sure you come unarmed."

From directly behind Jack, a familiar voice rasped, "That sounds like a trap."

She sat up, craning her head around to nod at the drell. "Sup, Krios. We got to the Citadel a little early; docked two hours ago, in fact. All the fuckin' noise from the landing gear woke me up."

"It's _not_ a trap," Garrus added, rather adamantly.

"I see." Thane circumnavigated Jack's end of the couch, making it so she didn't have to twist around to look at him, and took a glance at the elevator. "Are we allowed to go ashore yet?"

Tali spoke up, not taking her attention away from the holo. "Shepard went out right after we docked...he wanted to go see Admiral Anderson. The rest of the crew's been in and out since then, so feel free."

Hopping up from the couch, Jack nodded toward the elevator. "Wanna head out, then?"

"Yes, I'd like that. It will be nice to see the Citadel again."

"Yeah, haven't been there myself in forever..." The volume of their conversation gradually faded as the pair strode away, unaware that they were followed all the way to the elevator by Tali'Zorah's eyes. She stayed quiet until the doors slid shut, and then:

"Do you think Kelly was right?"

"About what?" asked Garrus, as he guided a transport cruiser towards the loading dock with a flick of his omni-tool.

"About those two!" the quarian blurted. "Didn't that look like a date to you?"

"A date? What? No." He actually chuckled a bit. "_Those_ two?"

"I know, but..." Tali rubbed at the back of her helmet, managing to look perplexed despite her face being obscured (no small accomplishment, that). "It _would_ be kind of sweet, though, wouldn't it? They're so different, but the way they walked off together...I thought it was cute."

"I guess," the turian shrugged. "I'm not much of a romantic; can't really judge. Maybe they're blowing off steam together. Like healthy adults. You know how it is, Tali, you gotta dump the reactor coolant every once in a while or else the core just explodes."

"..._Garrus_."

"Look, that came out wrong---"

"Smugly: My boss has no intention of paying you," came a timorous voice from the holo. "With unfettered menace: Now you must die."

"Damn it! A trap!"

* * *

"I counted at least fourteen critical errors in the C-Sec checkpoint back there," Thane said, straightening his collar and taking a quick look around the Zakera Ward. "They're getting lax."

"And I count at least five shops who couldn't do a damn thing if I decided to blow them up and take their shit," Jack answered. "Where you wanna go first?"

The drell blinked warily. "To pillage, or...?"

"Nah, Shepard would have a fit." She nudged him in the ribs with an elbow. "So stop looking at me like I'm about to go on a killing spree. Thought we'd do some shopping."

Relieved, Thane followed the convict as she ambled over to the window of a Sirta Foundation outlet. The two of them cut an impressive figure, between his flowing cape and her...entire ensemble, really, and the crowds tended to melt aside, making room for them to pass. "Did you have something in mind?" he asked, looking through the window at the display.

Jack nodded, her lips pursed. "Wanted to see if the new Unity amp was out," she answered. Her eyes squinted, peering through thick lashes at the tiny print next to each amp. "I'm gonna need to upgrade within the next three months, give or take...y'know, so I don't turn into a drooling retard." Fuck, had that ever been a kick in the (metaphorical) balls. Mordin had let her know a while back about the progressive neural degeneration that the Cerberus experiments would cause her, and that the best way to prevent it from happening was to constantly upgrade her amps to give all the element zero and biotic energy a sufficient outlet to bleed off their excess.

"I've used Unity models before," Thane said. "They don't spike as high as other brands, but I've found them to be reliable, and they channel steadily. No highs, but no real lows, either."

"You're right, yeah." Not having any luck so far, she continued searching. "A while back, some of the people I was with knocked off an asari transport; turned out it was loaded up with Serrice Council products. I got a couple Savant amps off that haul...that's the good shit, mind you, the kind you gotta sign a form and get a background check for." Jack sighed, her breath hissing between clenched teeth. "Not out yet. It'd better be soon, or else we're gonna have to hit up some more asari."

"_I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite store on the Citadel_," declared a familiar voice on the PA system.

Thane wandered away from the shop to lean on one of the stairway railings, as Jack blinked in surprise at the intercom. "I'm sure they'll release an upgrade for you soon enough," he said reassuringly, rubbing a finger over his own implant scar. Drell biotics, like humans, usually had their implants and amps installed at the base of their skull, right under the occipital bone. "Biotics are a cutthroat industry, after all, and someone's always putting out a new product."

"They'd better," Jack muttered, and the assassin could _swear_ she actually sounded sort of glum. "My Savant's almost two years outdated, and I'm sure as hell not going to get security clearance for another Serrice amp...hell, even if I did, I couldn't afford it." She nudged Thane over towards what looked like a software-based tech store. "Life's just a _blast_ when you're living on borrowed time--"

Almost exactly as the words left her mouth, she realized the implications, and actually stopped for a second, only resuming when the assassin nearly bumped into her from behind. "_Shit_, Krios," she said, eyes a bit wider than usual as she turned her head back towards him, "that was kind of a bitchy thing to say. Um..."

"No offense taken," he answered gracefully. "I accepted my body's death long ago. I've had a long, full life, and I intend to enjoy the year or so I have left, provided we return from our mission."

"You think we'll come back?" Jack mused aloud as they wandered into Saronis Applications, examining a rack full of tactical software. "We don't even know what's on the other side of the relay."

Thane picked up a boxed chip for a medi-gel capacity upgrade, examining the price and apparently trying to determine whether it was worth the credits. "I believe," he said after a moment of thinking, "that if it is possible to come back from the Omega-4 Relay, if a way exists for us to defeat the Collectors and return home safely, Shepard will do everything in his power to make sure that it happens. That's all I have to go on...but I believe it wholeheartedly."

"Heh...it'll have to be good enough, I guess." Jack carried a pair of shield generator chips over to the terminal, scanning both and feeding a handful of credits into the machine's slot. "Shepard's not bad, even if he _is_ kind of a dork sometimes. Kicks some ass with that sniper rifle, and he's done right by me so far."

With a sound of agreement, the drell followed suit, ringing up his upgrades. "Although he works with Cerberus out of necessity, he does not trust them. Mr. Vakarian has told me that they expect betrayal from the Illusive Man at any moment. I find it reassuring to know that our commander isn't blindly obeying orders from them."

"Fuck Cerberus." The Gospel According To St. Jack, in two words.

"Here." Thane reached for Jack's bag, which held the microchips, and carried it with his own. "No need for both of us to have our hands full."

"Thanks, Krios," she answered with a smirk. "Knew I brought you along for a reas—well, look who it is!"

He followed her gaze across the corridor, towards a kiosk that looked to be serving Earth food. Seated on a stool by the counter was Zaeed Massani, armed with a pair of chopsticks and hard at work liberating a bowl of ramen. The noodles, admittedly, looked tasty, and Thane was decidedly pleased by Jack's next words: "Let's go say hi, maybe grab a bite."

"That sounds excellent," he agreed, starting over towards the stand. "Perhaps he'd like to come along with us."

Jack barely mulled it over, and then shook her head. "Probably got things to do on his own. Besides," and out of the corner of the drell's eye he caught the hint of a Cheshire Cat grin on her face, "I said 'let's say hi', not 'let's pick up a fifth wheel'. I think I'd rather keep you all to myself."

With that, she bounded up behind the mercenary. "Hey Massani! _Draw_, shithead!"

Thane watched her go by, quickening his pace a bit to catch up before a fight broke out, and as he replayed the last fifteen seconds in his head (verbatim, being a drell) he felt his pulse speeding up alongside his steps.

Samara was right. She really _was_ interested.

He had the feeling he'd soon be saying a _lot_ of prayers to Arashu.


	7. Chapter 7

Mass Effect is the property of Bioware.

A/N: Sorry about the late update. I got caught up in real life, and then promptly won myself a trip to the hospital. _That_ was fun. (I'm okay, by the way.)

Said it before, but major thanks for all the reviews and faves. You guys have been the best encouragement I could hope for, and you make writing new chapters something to actually look forward to at the end of a long day-night-day-night-day (I tend to stay up for long stretches of time working) of compiling data.

* * *

**Seven**

"So then Draven comes up on the other side of the drive core and fires a rocket launcher at the heavy mech, right? But he's too close; he gets vaporized in the explosion and the impact knocks the bloody thing straight down the reactor shaft! Wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself."

The majority of the ramen stand's counter had been monopolized by Zaeed, who was using a pair of chopsticks, two cups, and a bowl of wonton to illustrate how his team had infiltrated and destroyed a turian dreadnought several years ago. To his side, Jack offered the occasional comment around a mouthful of egg roll, and Thane perched on a stool, stoically working his way through his noodles. The story had actually drawn a small crowd of patrons, most of whom were listening with rapt interest.

"I raced to an escape pod, as fast as I could," the mercenary continued, "and there was only one left when I got there. Raz was in it trying to close the door...wanted to leave us all for dead, the bastard. Didn't even get a chance to be surprised before I put a clip through his lying batarian face, and I jumped in and launched the pod just in time."

"What happened to the ship?" asked the chef, who had, at some point, stopped chopping up ingredients for the miso and begun following the story with everybody else.

"Half of that wreck got blown apart when the reactor overloaded, and the rest of it burned up in atmo." Zaeed gestured menacingly with one of the egg rolls (possibly symbolizing the fate of the ship). "And that's how we took down the dreadnought," he finished. "They said it was suicide to try it, but there I was: last goddamned man standing."

"Well, that bolsters my optimism about our mission," Thane remarked dryly.

Jack pushed her empty tray away, stretching contentedly like a tattooed cat. "So how 'bout this time, Massani?" she asked as the audience began to disperse and meander away from the stand. "What do you think our chances are?"

He shrugged. "Don't know about the rest of the squad...but me, I'm aiming to walk out of there." The grizzled mercenary bit down decisively on some more noodles, with such gravitas that the motion would've been comical if it wasn't Zaeed doing it. "'sall there is to it."

"Fair enough." Thane rose from his stool, casting an inquisitive gaze in Jack's direction. "Shall we continue, then? I believe there are more shops on the lower levels."

"Yeah, don't let me keep you," Zaeed agreed. "Talk more later, eh?"

A friendly nod in the merc's direction later, Jack was heading down a flight of stairs towards the lower end of Zakera Ward, teammate/friend/prospect/whatever he was in tow. She hadn't been on the Citadel in years, and the last visit had ended rather badly with a botched bank heist and eight dead gang members (ha, thinking about it that way made her feel like Zaeed), so the ward's bustle and gleam was new and interesting: more wholesome than Omega, less sterile than gen-pop in Purgatory, more real than Illium. On the surface it was ordered, with a C-Sec officer in practically every hallway, but as someone who knew how to look, Jack could see the telltale signs of what talking heads on the news liked to call a 'seedy underbelly'. Two salarians hunched in a dark corner, furtively passing unseen treasures between them. A flock of asari dressed almost as lightly as she was, catcalling at passersby with a seductive cheer that belied the dead look in their eyes. A sharply-dressed turian, his mandibles permanently wrenched into the sneer of cold command, haranguing a human shopkeeper while his krogan thugs kept watch by the doors.

Yeah, she could've called Citadel Station home once upon a time, if she were the settling-down type.

Thane surprised her by speaking up. "What do _you_ think our chances are?" he rasped, tilting his head to eye her thoughtfully as they walked.

"Eh. Zaeed's probably got the right idea, but..." Jack slowed to a halt outside the doors to some kind of nightclub; the bass thundering inside put a constant exclamation mark on the place's multicolored strobes. Patrons staggered out now and again; many were paired off and almost all were smashed off their asses. "Not so sure it's worth thinking about," she continued, adjusting her straps idly. "With people like us, what does it matter if we die out there? We're not known for having a fuckin' shelf life."

The drell nodded, his lips pursed as he considered this. "That's true. Part of my reason for taking this mission was that, considering my condition, I had little to lose by attempting it."

"Yeah. You're on the way out, and I'm pretty much doomed anyway. You get in enough fights, you're gonna fuck up and get iced in one eventually, and I get in a _lot_ of fights." She turned to a nearby viewport and waved a hand at the view of the Citadel's arms. "Better to go out with a bang, on your own terms. There's a whole galaxy out there, Krios, and sometimes I just want to set the entire fuckin' thing on fire before I die."

"We disagree on methods, but I think I understand your sentiment, at least," Thane agreed. "I confess that I, too, would rather die at a place I had ordained, fighting for a cause I believed in, rather than confined to a hospice bed and waiting for Kepral's to claim me." His fingers ran delicately around the edge of his high collar, as if searching for some way to keep themselves occupied while he talked. "I've tried to leave the galaxy a better place than I found it, and...I've made some mistakes along the way, but I would like to think that I've been successful."

Jack snorted. "I'm not really one to judge when it comes to mistakes. Made plenty of those...hell, some of 'em even hurt." Turning back to the drell, she raised an arm, gesturing towards the series of barbed tally marks running down her forearm. It tapered off into an intricate design that highlighted her knuckles, under which the word "DEATH" was prominently displayed (the tattoo artist said that usually people got "LIFE" on the other hand, but Jack found it more appropriate to just have another "DEATH" there). "I didn't let myself forget them, either."

To her surprise, the assassin stepped closer, taking her hand and studying the design thoughtfully. "So you didn't," he mused, eyes roaming over her outstretched arm. "What does it signify?"

"Mistakes," she answered, perhaps just a touch startled at the sudden smoothness of his scales on her bare flesh. "One for every time I trusted some son of a bitch, only to have to blow their heads off when they turned on me." Her lips twisted in a bitter grin. "That one hasn't been added to in years."

"No, I imagine not." He lifted the hand in his grasp slightly, tracing the network of elaborate tattoos up Jack's arm and towards her shoulder. "Perhaps the rest of these tell a happier story?"

Jack shifted in place, her eyes a little more alert than usual. Her skin prickled with goosebumps under Thane's fingertips as he circled around behind her. Slowly, with the methodical care he probably used to sight his sniper rifle, the light brush of his hand on her shoulders came to rest on the prominent omega symbol that dominated most of her back. "This one, I think," he finally said. "It has a certain...triumphant feel to it despite its grimness, like a monument to a long-dead conqueror."

She pushed back against his touch, just a bit. "You got an eye for ink, Krios. Yeah, I got that one to celebrate the first time everything went _right_. The job was on Omega, so I had it done as kind of a tribute: no matter what happened afterwards, I'd always have that moment on Omega." After a pensive moment of chewing on her lip, Jack added, "It was satisfying...I wanted to hold on to it."

"I see." Small favors: Thane still hadn't taken his hand away. She had enough self-control, at least, not to shiver like some in her situation would have. "What was so satisfying, then? Did you find someone deserving of your trust, and have it pay off in the end?"

"Nope. Earned a lot of credits, killed a lot of people."

"...Oh."

Jack grinned. "What can I say, Krios? I take my pleasures where I can get 'em."

"So I've noticed," he said with an amused smile, continuing to trace the omega. She fought down a shiver; his touch was so much _lighter_ than one would normally expect from an assassin. All the hired killers Jack had been with were walking bludgeons, perfect for rampaging their way through a metric fuckton of security systems and painting the walls with some poor guy's brain. Thane, on the other hand, operated more like a plasma scalpel: all precision and minimum effort. You'd never even know he was there if he didn't want you to.

(At this particular moment, Jack was fairly sure he wanted her to know.)

"There's certainly something to be said for enjoying life, I suppose," Thane admitted, circling back to Jack's side. His eyes wandered over towards the Dark Star Lounge's doors, which were actually vibrating from the volume of the music inside. "On that note, were you trying to suggest something by stopping here...?"

She blinked, following his gaze, and it took a second for the meaning to click. "Oh, you meant..." Jack cleared her throat, looking a touch sheepish. "I don't dance. Just seemed like a nice spot to stop."

The drell breathed a quiet, relieved sigh. "Neither do I."

"Had you going there, huh?" With a playful punch in the arm, Jack turned and headed towards a tunnel full of shops. "Don't worry, you're not off the hook yet. The worst part's still coming."

"Dare I ask?"

"Clothes shopping."

* * *

Although Thane's heart rate had elevated somewhat at the idea of helping a woman (particularly a volatile, potentially violent biotic) shop for clothing, he soon found his fears were misplaced. Jack was the type to grab what she wanted and go; apparently she had even less patience for this kind of thing than he did. Further relieving the situation was the fact that she only wanted a single piece of clothing to cover her torso. (Apparently most of Jack's away team missions tended to be on ludicrously cold planets.) Things promised to go quickly and painlessly, or at least much more so than he had anticipated.

"Perhaps not totally quick and painless," he murmured to himself fifteen minutes later as Jack examined herself in the mirror, dressed in a jet-black replica of his trenchcoat.

The convict spread her arms, watching how the fabric rippled behind her with a critical eye. "How the fuck do you run in this thing?" she asked, and punctuated the question with a shake of her shoulders. "It's not heavy, but there's so damn much of it that it's throwing me off when I try to move."

Thane meticulously kept his expression neutral. "Practice, mostly."

"_I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite store on the Citadel_," declared the PA system.

"I don't think it's gonna work." She shrugged the coat off, grabbing a black vest from the rack. "No reason to fall on my ass and get killed by the Collectors any earlier than I have to." A moment later, as she pulled the vest over her head: "Much better."

A once-over of the outfit drew an approving nod from the drell. The vest was sleek and form-fitting, providing a little coverage (well, a _lot_ of coverage, considering that it was Jack) and fitting with the rest of her outfit perfectly. "That should do nicely," he agreed. "Are you going to have it sent back to the Normandy?"

Jack nodded, passing the vest off to an attendant and entering her payment information at a nearby terminal. "No reason to wear it out; the Citadel's warm as hell and less people try to sell me useless shit if I'm showing off the ink."

"I can't argue with that logic."

They passed through the store's sliding doors in silence, coming out into a busy corridor and eventually slowing to a halt at a bench near the rapid transit terminal. Jack took a seat, sprawling out over half the bench and leaving Thane to occupy what was left.

"So," she began after a silence that was just long enough to become uncomfortable, "how do you wanna do this?"

One eyeridge lifted slightly. "What do you mean?"

Jack shifted on the bench, pulling a knee up and turning to face the assassin. "Let's not beat around the bush here, Krios; I like you. And since you've put up with my shit all day, I'm guessing it's mutual."

"I suppose," he said carefully, sizing Jack up in the way she imagined he did with most targets, "that would be correct. This is territory I haven't covered in many years, so forgive me if I come across as...over-cautious."

"Nah, 'sfine." She boldly sidled up closer, pushing against his side, and slid an arm around his shoulders. Thane stiffened, and she could feel his muscles twitching slightly against her skin, but he dutifully stayed put. "So I'm thinking maybe, when this is done, we head back to the ship, I clear out some room in the hold, and we start talking about ways to cap off the day, hmm?"

The drell hesitated just a touch, his gracefully-curved lips pursed together, and somehow Jack only found that to be further encouragement. "I'm not sure that wouldn't be moving too fast," he offered in counterpoint, although to his credit, he didn't pull away from her. "You don't want to rush into something that you might regret later, after all."

Jack gave him her best 'what, really' look. "For fuck's sake, Krios, you don't have to get to know somebody to sleep with them, you just have to know where to _put_ it. I'm not trying to pay you back this time, I'm doing it of my own free will, all right?"

"Still," Thane continued to argue, his dark eyes filled with concern, "if you regretted it later--"

"I don't make a habit of regretting things." She reached up, snagged a finger around the silver choker that adorned his collarbone, and pulled his head firmly towards hers. "C'mere."

He did not resist, and as they drew closer, lips merely inches away, Jack was already claiming an inward victory. Closer..._closer_...

A communicator buzzed between them. "Thane, Joker here. Do you copy?"

The words that Jack growled under her breath as Thane jerked away from her and fumbled for his comm were absolutely unprintable.

"I read you," he answered, surprisingly smooth considering how rattled he seemed to be. "What's the situation?"

"Message just came in for you. The sender's encrypted, but it's marked urgent and it was addressed to you, specifically."

"Thank you." Thane was already standing up, even as the communicator hissed back into silence. "We have to go," he said, with a note of urgency in his voice that made Jack stop grousing and look up.

"What's up?" she asked, rising and following in turn.

"When I left with the Normandy, I only gave one person details on where I was going," the assassin explained, hurrying to the rapid transit console and hailing a cab. "He was only supposed to get in contact with me if his informants were able to make a major breakthrough, which means..."

Jack cocked her head as he trailed off. "Which means?"

She had never seen more intensity in his gaze than when he turned to look at her. "Which means they've found my son."

* * *

"He never said anything about a son!" Jack complained, throwing her hands in the air. "He knows every little detail about me at this point, but fuck if I know anything about _him_."

Tali'Zorah shifted awkwardly, making sure to keep out of arms' length. The two of them were waiting outside the communications room, which Thane had disappeared into twenty minutes prior. He had not since reemerged, and the quarian was beginning to grow antsy from waiting to get a turn on the comm unit. "He seems like a very private person," she ventured. "Perhaps he's not comfortable talking about it."

Jack glared at the quarian, satisfied when she quailed slightly. "You'd think he would've thrown around a little goddamn reciprocity," she muttered, and thankfully Tali was spared from any further rantings because the doors slid open and Thane stepped out, hands clasped behind his back and eye-ridges furrowed in thought.

"I apologize for taking so long," he said. "A matter of great importance has come up."

The convict folded her arms and stared pointedly, not bothering to voice the question.

"...My son is here, on the Citadel," Thane explained. "He has...I suppose I should start from the beginning."

"It'd be nice," Jack said flatly.

Slowly, the drell strode over to a nearby water fountain and leaned on its edge. He seemed almost in a daze, Jack thought, as if the news had totally thrown his paradigm out of whack. "I mentioned to you that it had been ten years since my wife's death," he began. "That was also the last time I saw my son. When Irikah was killed, I went to take vengeance on the men responsible and left Kolyat in the care of his aunts and uncles. When the task was finished, I returned to see him again...but he had drifted away from me. I could no longer find him."

"Perhaps he went looking for you," Tali suggested. "If my father went missing, I'd stop at nothing to see him again."

Thane's lips pressed together tightly. "I'm afraid Kolyat would have much less reason to do that than you, Miss Zorah. I was...neglectful in raising him; most of my time was spent contracting as an assassin, and I rarely had time to see my boy." His shoulders drooped, and his gaze fell to the Normandy's floor. "I failed as a parent, and I've never had the opportunity to make up for that."

Jack leaned against the wall, resting her hands behind her head and rather prominently displaying her biceps. "But now he's on the Citadel, and you're gonna look for him."

"I have to," Thane agreed, with a vaguely desperate tone to his voice (a strange sound to hear from him, Jack thought). "My contact told me he arrived three days ago...he's selling his services as an assassin, and has taken a contract to kill a man."

"Sounds like he wanted to get in your head." Jack eyed him thoughtfully. "Trying to get closer to you, understand what kind of person you were since he never really knew you."

The drell pushed away from the fountain, pacing past her. "I have to find him," he murmured. "I cannot allow my son to become a killer."

"Wouldn't it just be his body that's doing the killing?" she asked, thinking back on what Krios had said earlier about the drell belief system and how he justified assassination for hire.

To Jack's surprise, he turned, clenching a fist beside him. "I will not let it happen," Thane repeated, a faint growl touching the lower registers of his voice. "I can't allow anyone to make the same mistakes I did. Not you, not Kolyat...not _anyone_. I will find him and stop him from doing this, and then...I don't know what I could possibly do next, to make up to him for all those missing years." His inner eyelids opened, letting Jack have a look at just how serious his expression was. "But I won't let my son share my regrets. No one deserves that."

In that moment, Jack found herself enlightened regarding part of Thane Krios' nature; whereas he had previously been a total enigma, impossible to read like most people, she now understood one fundamental thing about him: he was _a good man_, an impossibly good one. She had a hunch that, if she were a softer-hearted person, hearing him just now would have made her ashamed of some of the acts she'd committed.

Tali spoke up. "I might be able to help you there," she offered, gesturing with her omni-tool. "Garrus has some kind of mission he's bringing Shepard along for, over at the bottom of the wards, and I'm supposed to stand by in case they need any data found or interpreted. If you'd like, I can stay in touch and watch the Citadel newswires for any sign of your son."

"I would appreciate that." Thane smiled gratefully at the quarian. "Any information you could offer would be welcome. For now, I need to head ashore and look for one of my contacts on the Citadel." He turned and headed down the hallway towards the airlock...

...and a second later, Jack fell into step beside him. "Sounds good. Who's the snitch we're looking for?"

The drell blinked, although he didn't break stride. "Jack, you don't have to come along. Kolyat is my son, and therefore my problem; I don't need to impose on any of the crew to deal with it."

"You're not imposing." She kept up, not letting him get a word in. "You've helped me out with plenty of things; let me have a turn."

"You don't owe me for those times," Thane answered patiently. "I don't intend to hold you to any debt, although I appreciate your offer."

They had reached the airlock door and, despite his protestations, Jack pushed her way in ahead of him, folding her arms again and staring the assassin down. "Look, you said...back on Pragia, you said I wasn't a bad person," she said, locking their gazes. "Maybe you're right. Maybe I want to help somebody I like, because I give a goddamn what happens to him. I _want_ to do this, Krios, and not just because you backed me up at the Cerberus base; because I want you to find your son and I'd rather make sure you do than go down to Chora's, get shitfaced, and start a fistfight with an elcor."

A single tense moment of contemplation passed, and then finally he stepped into the airlock with her.

"Thank you," he whispered as the gates hissed around them.

She shrugged. "Hell, if I'm gonna be one of the good guys, I gotta start somewhere."

Thane chuckled then, a relieved burst of nervous energy, and his hand found its way into hers. "You are a remarkable woman, _siha_,"he murmured deep in his throat.

"Yeah, well, don't say I never---wait, the fuck did you just call me?"

"If we survive the Omega-4 relay," he answered as the airlock whooshed open, "I will tell you."


	8. Chapter 8

Mass Effect is the property of Bioware.

* * *

**Eight**

Tracking down Kolyat Krios on the Citadel, a space station with a population of 13.2 million sentients (and growing everyday), was going to be a real needle in a haystack. Even though drell weren't a terribly common sight on the Citadel, the sheer density of the people they would have to sift through was a staggering obstacle in itself, and combined with the fact that the search team was all of two people (three, if you counted Tali playing operator from back on the Normandy), things were looking decidedly grim, and Jack was not in the mood to add to the tally of difficulties they were experiencing by the time she and Thane descended the gangplank. Murphy's Law, therefore, necessitated the presence of Miranda Lawson on the dock, directing technicians in their maintenance of the Normandy's engines.

"I want the thrusters running at optimum levels by the time we set back out," she ordered, and promptly turned to face her erstwhile-squadmates. "Where are _you two_ going?"

Ten thousand obvious answers, all of them hostile, leaped to Jack's mind. Particularly after their little scuffle in the office, which Shepard had just barely managed to break up before things got ugly, she'd been looking for any possible excuse to launch the Cerberus cheerleader out into the great black nothingness and call it a job well done. She wasn't sure what annoyed her more: Miranda's unshaking confidence that everything Cerberus did was either a) perfect and righteous or b) not their fault, or her tendency to be so goddamned _smug_ about it.

Thankfully, Thane answered for her, and didn't bother to break stride. "I'm dealing with a personal matter on board the station," he stated. "Jack is assisting me."

Okay, great. Smooth. Conflict resolved. Keep walking, focus on the mission, just a little further to the elevator...

"Hopefully she'll be better for you than she was for her classmates at the Teltin facility," came a lilting remark from behind, with just enough calculated sweetness to ring deliberately false.

Jack halted in her tracks and turned, slowly. Next to her, Thane stopped as well with a sigh.

"Turn around and say it again."

Nothing.

"I said turn around and _say it again_."

"Stay calm," the assassin advised, putting a hand on her shoulder and firmly steering her back to the elevator. "This isn't worth the time and effort, _siha_. I need you to focus on the mission."

"Hands off, Krios, she's getting splattered all over the---"

Jacob Taylor, who had been bringing up a shipment of small arms in a hovering crate, stepped into the fray, apparently having overheard the conversation as he drew near. "Yeah, let's not get out of control here, people," he said, both hands raised in a placating gesture. "We're all on the same side here, so save it for the Collectors." His presence likely saved the situation from escalating further; the lieutenant was an affable sort, both professional and generally friendly, and as the only other Cerberus member in the squad he tended to provide a moderating influence for Miranda.

Thane had managed to herd Jack into the elevator, but as the doors slid shut in front of them, the sentence "Jacob, if you don't expect _Subject Zero_ to try shooting us in the back the minute we turn towards the Collectors, you've taken more head wounds than I thought" was quite clearly audible.

Well, apparently Jacob wasn't _enough_ of a moderating influence.

The elevator was thankfully in mid-ascension by the time Jack punched its door, letting out a frustrated snarl. "I," she growled, "am gonna tear that bitch in half when this is over." As her companion opened his mouth to speak, she whirled to glare at him and nipped his burgeoning objection in the bud. "And you don't have to say anything; I know I shouldn't because it's wrong and blah fuckin' blah. Look, that spiel worked on Aresh because you caught me early and I didn't have time to think about it, but this? I'm not letting this shit slide. Not happening."

"I was actually going to say," Thane interjected smoothly, with his hands clasped behind his back, "that you might have more fun _not_ trying to kill her."

She raised an eyebrow. "Meaning?"

"Miranda, as you've noticed, is the type who has to know everything about everyone. A burgeoning chessmaster of sorts, likely trying to imitate our mysterious benefactor the Illusive Man." The assassin cocked his head, studying Jack out of the corner of one eye. "I imagine that if you went contrary to her expectations, she would become...somewhat dissuaded, perhaps, in her ability to read everyone around her. Nervous, you might say." He kept a straight face like a champ, but Jack could just barely see the ghost of a smirk on his lips. "She may even lose a little sleep over it."

The wheels turned in Jack's head. They may have turned a bit slower for her than some people, but her mind worked inexorably towards the obvious conclusion, and after a moment of contemplation, she bit a lip and nodded. "I'll take it under consideration, Krios." A brief (and decidedly sinister) grin flickered his way as she leaned against the drell's side, one finger idly running over his arm. "You're more of a bastard than you let on, y'know that?"

"I _have_ been told that at times," Thane admitted, relaxing just a touch despite his obvious excitement over the mission. He raised a hand to his ear, checking the comm unit for the fifteenth time. "Thane to Normandy; we're currently descending to the Zakera ward. Have you uncovered anything pertinent yet?"

"Fifty-seven drell have entered the Citadel in the past two weeks, according to customs records." Tali's voice, already tinny thanks to her helmet, was even more so on the communicator, and Jack had to strain to hear her over the blaring horn ensemble that served as elevator music. "Thirty-two of those have departed as of today, three of them were killed in a shootout by the markets, and one of them is you, which means twenty-one potential Kolyats on the station."

The convict mulled this over. "Shit...well, that's bad odds, but with that few, at least somebody's more likely to remember a drell being around." She could feel Thane's muscles tense under her fingers. He was clearly worried; in fact, it was the most tense she could ever recall him being. The drell was always cool as ice, even under life-threatening pressure, but now, with his son on the line and a chance to make up for his mistakes, he was just as human as anybody else.

Jack wasn't sure if she found that reassuring or worrisome.

"Depending on how Kolyat advertises his services, someone may have contact information for him," Thane said, one hand to his chin. "A professional wouldn't be traceable that way, but he has no experience at running such an operation."

Although she'd never needed to use an assassin, for obvious reasons, Jack had done her fair share of hiring intermediaries to fence the loot from smuggling or hijacking operations. Plenty of them existed on Omega (supply and demand at work), and it stood to reason that the Citadel, though slightly 'cleaner', would have its fair share as well. "If he advertises, any go-betweens on the Citadel probably know him," she reasoned. "Or at least how to reach him."

"Well said, _siha_." He seemed to relax again, though she had seen enough by now to know he'd be a ball of nerves again in several seconds. "We should make some discreet inquiries about intermediaries when we get down to the wards...perhaps at Chora's Den or the Dark Star. There's a lot of ground to cover, and I doubt we have much time before Kolyat takes a contract." Sure enough, there he went, tensing up and shifting from side to side against her, clearly full of excess energy.

Jack squeezed the drell's shoulder, kneading at the muscle in an attempt to calm him. "Look, I know you're worried," she began, and promptly trailed off. Shit, he'd made this 'comforting speech' thing seem easy all those times. "Uh," she continued lamely. "You shouldn't be. Because we're gonna find your kid, and we...well...we're gonna _find_ him. And if he tries to kill anybody, I'll..." The obvious ending to that sentence was a very bad idea, and she realized it about halfway through, changing gears abruptly and trying to salvage it: "...kill whoever he's trying to kill. First, I mean. So that he can't."

A beat went by.

"Fuck _me_, I'm bad at this."

After a few more seconds of silence, Jack became acutely aware of a strangled sound echoing through the elevator, and a trembling against her hand. She blinked, glancing at Thane with bewilderment, and had to watch him shake for a few moments before she realized it: the bastard was _snickering_. Trying to hold back what looked like a full-on laugh riot, in fact.

"_Krios_!" she screeched, punching him in the shoulder, at which point he finally lost the battle with his suave, collected image and dissolved into (still dignified) laughter. "It's not funny, you asshole! I was trying to be reassuring!"

"For what it's worth," he managed through labored gasps, "you made an admirable effort at it."

Jack folded her arms, attempting to sulk but unable to stop the grin that tugged at the edges of her mouth. "At least I got you to loosen up. You were about to wear a hole in the floor, the way you were dancing around there."

The assassin smiled back, his dark eyes glinting. "I appreciate it. Thank you for your concern."

"Mmm." She tilted her head from side to side, loosening her neck joints with a wet crunch of vertebrae. "So, where do we start looking? Any contacts from ten years ago that might still be alive?"

He licked his lips thoughtfully, and both sets of eyelids twitched.

---_the child stares up at him; wide, searching eyes and a broken-toothed grin between split and bleeding lips, worshipping the petty gifts he's offered. "He comes around sometimes, Krios," with the eagerness to please that one would expect of a puppy. "But he's always got men with guns..."_---

"I believe," Thane ventured, turning his head to peer down at Jack, "I just might have one."

* * *

The contact in question turned out to be a squirrelly kid in his late teens, preening in a suit that was a full size too big for him and looking for all the world like some nouveau-riche hustler who would be either ruined or dead before he'd reached twenty-one years old.

"Krios!" he exclaimed, clasping Thane's hand warmly and smiling with a mouthful of surgically-perfected teeth. "I thought you'd retired! What're you doing back in the Wards?"

Although Thane had wanted to track his contact down immediately and get the information out of him, Jack, who had a slightly better insight into the criminal mindset, had dissuaded him on the grounds that they didn't want to spook the kid by showing up unexpectedly; he might run or try to mislead them. They had opted to call him instead and arrange a meeting, and as it happened, the young man had some time open less than thirty minutes later, so here they were in a smoke-filled corner of Chora's Den, gathering around a table and preparing to discuss business.

"I _am_ retired, Mouse," the assassin explained, his smile filled with a distant, fond nostalgia. "The job I'm doing right now isn't official, but I thought you might be able to help me with it." He gestured toward Jack with a hand. "This is Jack, one of my teammates; she's offered to assist me here. Jack, this is Mouse. He performed surveillance for me whenever I operated on the Citadel ten years ago."

Jack nodded curtly, pulling a chair up and straddling it with no attempt to hide her weaponry.

Thane took a seat, motioning for the younger man to do the same. "This is something of a personal matter for me, Mouse," he began, clasping his hands atop the table. "I'm looking to find someone, and with the amount of business you do on the Citadel, I thought you might be able to point me in the right direction."

"Citadel's a big place, y'know," Mouse said apologetically. He picked up his glass, stirring the cloudy liquor inside it, and took a sip. "He'd have to be pretty distinctive, unless he's a big fish...in which case you probably wouldn't be needing me."

"Distinctive enough," Thane agreed. "He's a drell, like myself. Teal-colored, and not much older than you."

Only a split second of hesitation passed before Mouse's expression became carefully neutral. "Well, that's pretty distinct, at least," he began, with his voice the very picture of 'guarded nonchalance', "but one drell on a space station with thirteen mil--"

"You've got a shitty poker face, kid." Jack's eyes flicked over to Thane. "Want me to 'encourage' a little truthfulness?"

"That won't be necessary; he's a good man and he'll cooperate with us when he's appraised of the details." Thane leaned forward, his dark eyes glittering, and fixed his steady gaze on Mouse. "Mouse, that drell is _my son_. Kolyat, remember? You asked about him when you were younger."

Mouse's shoulders slumped. "Yeah, I...I know," he admitted. "He had some of the files on jobs you'd pulled before you retired, and a holo of me, so I guess that's why he tracked me down. He wanted me to hook him up with a contract, just like you." He chewed at a fingernail, eyes occasionally shooting Jack a suspicious look as if he expected her to vault the table and maul him at any second.

"I thought as much," Thane said mournfully. "Did you find him an employer, or a target?"

"Look, Krios, I can't talk about this." Mouse's eyes were frantic, and he was already beginning to glance over his shoulder, looking to see if anybody had overheard their conversation. "You know I'd help you if I could, but I'm in deep here. The kind of people I work for...they can make me disappear like _that_." He snapped his fingers, a quick motion full of nervous energy. "If it gets out that I was talking to you, that's it for me."

Leaning against the chair's back, Jack fixed a heavy-lidded stare of skepticism on the young man. "Killing off an intermediary's a big deal, y'know," she drawled. "Lots of people don't take well to somebody else fucking up their business because of one little suspicion; they'll miss a good go-between." With a smirk, she added, "Unless you're _not_ good at it."

Mouse's cheeks reddened slightly. "I'm the best on the Citadel," he insisted. "Look, I see what you're trying to---"

"Your name won't be mentioned," Thane assured him. "I will devise an excuse for your employer, if need be...and it's not likely that he'll be in much of a position to disbelieve me, if this goes how I expect it will."

"Yeah, but---"

The drell's voice was a low crackle as he gripped the edges of the table. "Mouse. I have to find my boy, and I have to do it before he does something he'll regret. _Please_." There was a hint of steel under his normally polite tone, and it was obvious he was well past pleasantries.

After a moment, Mouse dropped his forehead into a palm, rubbing at the bridge of his nose and clearly trying to stave off an incoming headache. "All right," he murmured. "It's...the contract's for Elias Kelham, okay? You probably wouldn't know him; he was small-time when you were here, but he's a real shark. Took over a big chunk of the rackets over the last ten years, and now he's hired your kid. I don't know who he wants dead, but Kelham's your man."

Thane was saying something in response, but Jack's attention had been drawn elsewhere. A curious thing had happened the moment Mouse had mentioned Elias Kelham; although he was speaking well below the usual volume for Chora's Den, it seemed he had nonetheless been overheard. A figure in one corner, shrouded from view both by the club's minimalist lighting and a black hood over its face, had turned noticeably at Kelham's name. Seconds later, it had folded out of its game of Skyllian Five, risen from the table, and faded into the crowds around them. Jack strained to make the ebon silhouette out again, glancing around the writhing masses on the dance floor.

"...done the right thing," the assassin finished. "I can never truly repay you for this."

That person had been right there a second ago, where did---

--_there._ Jack caught the briefest glimpse of the hooded figure making its way around a pillar. Her hand rested on the butt of her shotgun, just in case she needed to take their mystery eavesdropper out before it reported to Kelham, but disturbingly, it seemed to be moving _closer_ to them, rather than towards the exit. A moment later, it was gone, disappeared into the crowd of patrons again.

Mouse was standing. "Look, you wanna repay me, put a bullet in Kelham when you're done," he said, glancing around again and mopping a torrent of sweat from his brow. "I'm a dead man if he finds out about this...but either way, good luck with your kid, Krios. Nice seeing you again; wish I could've done it under better circumstances." Without another word, he turned on his heel and hurried out of Chora's Den, looking for all the world like a man under a death sentence.

Thane watched him go, shaking his head. "So do I," he said sadly. "If none of this had---"

"Hate to torpedo the memories, Krios," Jack broke in, "but we've got company." She waved a hand over towards the dance floor, taking in the gyrating hordes. "There was a spook in the corner; ears pricked up as soon as the kid mentioned Elias Kelham and then they took off...I lost them in the crowd a second ago, but it didn't look like they were going for the exits."

One browridge lifted slightly. "A fight, then?"

"Maybe. You'd need a set of brass ones to start a shootout in here, but---" She stopped short. There it was again, and this time it was maybe ten meters away, at most, and illuminated by one of the strobe lights. The figure threaded its way between tables with catlike grace, sauntering directly towards their spot, and if Jack wasn't convinced that trouble was en route before, her hackles were definitely up now. "Heads up. They're coming right at us from your right, so either they're ballsy as fuck or we're about to get ambushed."

Thane glanced to his right, immediately picking out the approaching form, and nodded. "Don't start anything. We don't know what we're up against here, and it's best to get an idea of the situation. If you start shooting now, this crowd will panic, and I don't relish fighting in that kind of environment."

"Fair enough." She relaxed a bit, but kept her hand on the shotgun just in case.

As the figure drew closer, Jack could make out more details. It was clearly a woman, slight of build and shorter than average for a human, kitted out in a black fiber-weave catsuit with what looked like a pair of Armali omni-tool gauntlets. The gauntlets weren't market-issue models, either, which meant they were either custom or prototypes, which in turn meant they were ludicrously expensive, probably stolen, and definitely illegal. When the stranger finally stopped at their table, Jack peered at her face, trying to make out any details; her olive-skinned features were clearly human, but everything above her nose was shrouded by the hood, making it impossible to identify her.

After a brief sizing-up on all sides, the stranger spoke. "Mind if I join you?" Her voice was low and husky, with a vaguely exotic twinge to her accent.

Jack glanced at the assassin, choosing to defer to his judgment (he seemed on top of the situation, and she was already prepared to open fire at a moment's notice anyway). He nodded slowly, gesturing to a chair. "We have some room, so go ahead."

"Ah, thank you." Pulling a chair out, the woman swept down into it with a single flowing motion. She reached into her suit, producing a long-stemmed pipe, and lit it with a flick of one wrist. "I happened to be passing by, and couldn't help overhearing that you have some interest in a...mutual acquaintance of ours."

"I might." Thane eyed her appraisingly, keeping his expression neutral (and doing a much better job of it than Mouse had). "That would depend on who wants to know, of course."

The stranger grinned, taking a long drag on the pipe. "Names are for friends." With a quick puff, she blew a smoke ring over the drell's head. "So I don't need one."

"In _some_ places," Jack responded, "people who heard that might think you were trying to start shit." Her shotgun extended, its barrel hidden under the table, as she trained it on the newcomer. "If you're not, then you might wanna say so before we start getting jumpy."

"Touchy." The woman didn't seem too fazed; chances were good she'd been in this kind of situation before, from the looks of it. "The only thing I'm interested in starting, actually, is something you might be very interested in: an alliance. You and I both need to visit Mr. Kelham...for totally different reasons, I'm guessing, but the fact stands."

Thane folded his arms. "I need to ask him several questions, yes. What's your interest in him?"

"Kelham's got an original holo of Forta's masterpiece, _Exultation Under The Rings Of Thrivaldi_," she answered with a certain sly cheer, "and I think it'd look nice on my wall. He's got it on a pedestal in his compound up in the Presidium, and it's pretty damn secure: DNA metric scans, sensor grids, the works. Now, I happen to have some of the tools necessary to get into the place, and if I waited a few days to keep hacking the sensors I'd have a code to bypass them...but you two look like you've been around the block a few times when it comes to infiltrations, and with a little cooperation, I could get the holo early, and you could get in to see Kelham." Gesturing with the pipe, she added, "What happens to him after that is your business, of course. I didn't see you entering the place. In fact, I haven't spoken to you. I wasn't even here."

"Indeed not," Thane agreed. His fingertips tapped lightly on his upper arms as he studied the thief. "If, however, we decided to take a walk around the Presidium later tonight, I wonder where we might find ourselves?"

"Behind the Ilos monument, with a little luck," Jack grinned. "It's a nice, quiet spot with nobody watching." She was rewarded with a small cough, the drell having the grace to be a bit embarrassed.

The thief took a final puff and stowed the pipe again, blowing the smoke from her nostrils like a dragon. "I suppose that's one way to celebrate," she demurred, and tapped at the omni-tool on her right hand. "You might want to have a look at the data I'm sending you, then; it might be useful information, say...thirty minutes from now?"

"That sounds like an excellent suggestion." Thane nodded politely, bringing up his own omni-tool's interface and examining the data. "A pleasure talking to you."

"Likewise, Mr. Krios." In the second it took from Jack to look from the data display back to the chair, the woman was gone, having vanished back into the crowd as abruptly as she had appeared.

"...Uh-_huh_," she finally said, rather flatly.

The drell glanced back at her. "An interesting turn of events, I'd say."

"I'm not exactly good at this secretive thing, Krios," she said, one lip curling at the mere mention of subterfuge, "but I'm guessing that's an address she just gave you."

"It is."

"And we're really gonna take her at face value and do this."

"We are."

A moment passed in contemplation, after which Jack breathed out a sigh and shook her head. "Hell if I don't like it, but you know what? If there's anybody in this fucked-up galaxy I'd trust with this, it's you." Her fingers drummed nervously on the table's surface. "I _will_ say 'I told you so' if this goes to hell, though."

"I appreciate your trust," Thane answered, scooping up her hand from the table, "and I understand that it is not given lightly, _siha_. Thank you." He pressed his lips to her knuckle, right above the 'A' tattoo; the sensation was warm and much smoother than the rest of his scales had been.

"Ain't you a charmer." She rose and cuffed the drell playfully around the back of his head, but couldn't quite hide a rising blush. "Look, if we're gonna be in the Presidium in thirty minutes, we'd better get to a transit hub."

"Let's move, then," he said, rising in turn. "We have an appointment to keep with Elias Kelham."


	9. Chapter 9

Mass Effect is the property of Bioware.

* * *

**Nine**

Some places could be totally different at night. Teeming city streets might be deserted, lending an eerie stillness to the oppressive darkness that always came with night. The lack of people only emphasized every little sound in the distance, teasing at the very human paranoia of predators in the dark.

The Presidium was not one of those places.

"How do they even tell when it's night?" Jack wondered out loud as she and Thane pushed through a crowd of diplomats in front of the embassy. "They never turn the lights out or anything?"

Apparently they didn't, because it was well past two in the morning (at least, by the clock the Normandy had been going on) and everything was as brightly lit as if the Citadel had its own little sun right there on the upper decks. Jack supposed there were enough unconventional things on the Citadel that it made enough sense in context; hell, it was disorienting enough that every time she looked up she saw _more city_ instead of the sky. At least Omega had the decency to be linear.

Tali's voice crackled on the comm unit. "Shepard and Garrus found their target, apparently. They're on the way to go take care of it, so I've got a free moment. Anything you need?"

"Elias Kelham." Thane gracefully brushed his way past a loitering hanar and stopped outside the entrance to a secured compound. "Can you access any records on him?" He motioned with one hand, and Jack followed him around the building's side, after taking a glance over her shoulder to see if they were being followed.

"Good thinking," she muttered to the drell. "She'll probably be around one of the back entrances."

"Citadel records have him listed as an investment banker from Shin Akiba," Tali answered, "but he plays the stock market as well, and that plus his income patterns mean he's probably front-running. It's fairly obvious, so he must have C-Sec paid off: they leave him alone and he doesn't cause any major trouble."

"He's soft," Jack concluded. "We shake him up and he'll sing like a bitch."

Thane glanced to both sides, checking for observers, and hurried around to the back of the compound. A security camera was mounted on the wall, covering that particular corner, and he pressed himself against the wall to slide under its blind spot. "Kelham is not so soft that he couldn't order a hit on someone's life," he said. "We would do well not to underestimate him."

"I'm just saying," and here the convict followed suit, taking care to stay directly under the camera, "you don't see him out on the street with a pistol, trying to do the job himself."

Sure enough, there was a rear entrance at the back of Kelham's building; it was, unsurprisingly, secured with a digital lock and made of a heavy reinforced alloy, so there would be no brute-forcing it. (Jack thought she probably _could_ if need be, but that would probably involve alerting everyone within three blocks.) The lock bore a data strip in lieu of a keyhole, meaning it couldn't be picked in any of the conventional ways (decryption tools, or in rare and special cases, a good old-fashioned needle). Thane examined it nonetheless. "This must be the biometric scanner," he rasped. "It would be best not to touch it until our contact arrives; I don't want to risk setting off alarms with the wrong DNA."

"A wise move," said a familiar voice next to them, and the lithe shadow from Chora's Den brushed past Jack on her way to the door. She reached into her suit, producing a strip of what looked like leather, and pressed it against the scanner's surface.

"When the hell'd you get here?" Jack asked, feeling slightly bewildered. She hadn't heard anybody approaching, and Thane had made no indication that he'd seen anything.

"Just now." Under the hood, she could see the thief's mouth twitch, causing the wine-colored stripe on her lower lip to ripple slightly. "I'm glad we're getting this done now...I was starting to get restless waiting for those bypass codes. It'll be more fun this way." A pleased smirk crossed her face as the scanner shifted to a pleasant green, accompanied with the _click_ of a lock disengaging. "Perfect."

One click on the control panel later, and the door slid open compliantly, leaving the trio to make their way in. Jack lingered, making sure the door shut securely behind them, and reset the lock with a few quick taps on the keypad. "What was that you used to get in?" she asked, more out of professional curiosity than anything else.

Thane answered before their erstwhile partner could: "Skin." He had taken the point position, leading them down the hallway with both pistols drawn and ready for any unexpected guests. "In order to identify as friendly to the scanner, I'm guessing our benefactor collected DNA fragments from Kelham and created a piece of synthesized skin that simulated his vitals."

"Took long enough to get all the DNA for it, too," the thief added, putting a hand on Thane's shoulder (Jack, despite herself, bristled possessively) and holding him back from moving out into the building's main hall. "Let's just say I had to pilfer a _lot_ of drinking glasses, at least until Kelham got a little careless with one of his one-night stands."

Dutifully ignoring the convict's snicker at the implications, she waved at the doorway to the main hall, producing a small cylinder from her belt. "All right, the holo's in the next room, along with most of the art," she explained. "That's fine with me; easier to steal it that way. We've got a few obstacles in the way, though, and I'm going to need the two of you to get through them."

"What kind of obstacles are we talking?" Jack asked, peering through the doorway. The room was dark, but she could see well enough to make out a downright vulgar display of excess. Statues, holos, paintings...Kelham was clearly loaded and had no qualms whatsoever about showing it off. Well, before the night was over, they'd have stolen some of his art and beaten the location of Thane's son out of him; Jack savored the anticipation of leaving with the smugly satisfied feeling that only truly comes from screwing over the rich.

"For starters..." Pulling the pin on the cylinder, the woman dropped it onto the floor and pushed it through the door with one foot, getting it a good distance into the main hall. A cloud of smoke began to hiss from its interior, and it only had to dissipate for a few moments before one of the obstacles became extremely clear.

Lasers. _Thousands_ of lasers.

It wasn't like in the vids, with a couple slow-moving beams that someone like Thane could dance gracefully through and call it a day. The crimson grid stretching out over Kelham's entire main hall was stationary and packed as dense as a batarian minefield. There was no way a normal-sized body could fit between any of them; the slightest attempt to get through the room conventionally would trigger whatever alarms the beams were hooked to. Jack whistled with mild awe.

"I take it," Thane said, totally unshaken by this turn of events, "you have a plan for this part."

"Naturally," the woman answered, producing a small data module and popping off the cap that covered its plug. From her tone, it wasn't hard to envision her eyes lighting up under the hood with the glee of a criminal mastermind watching a plan come together. "If my sources were correct, you're a biotic, Mr. Krios. Is that true?"

"I am." His browridges furrowed slightly as he clarified. "I'm not particularly skilled at it, however; whatever you have in mind, Jack might be a better choice, as she is an exceptionally gifted biotic."

Jack punched a fist into her palm, a confident grin crossing her face. "Need the wall torn down?"

"...Not quite. This is going to be extremely delicate."

The grin immediately turned into a scowl. "Oh."

Stepping to one corner of the doorway, the thief pointed to the inside wall. "The security terminal is inside the main hall, at least...but it's all the way over there. I've programmed an override into this module, but we can't approach the terminal to use it, obviously, or the whole heist goes up in smoke." She turned, and her appraising gaze landed on Jack. "But with some extra eyes to guide them, a skilled biotic could move it through the lasers and get us into the system."

That...didn't sound appetizing in the slightest. Jack shifted uncomfortably. "You sure this isn't more your speed, Krios?" she asked, glancing to the drell. "I'm not really the person you go to for precision."

"You," he answered, "have much more biotic ability than I do. I'm not sure I could float the module all the way to the terminal, much less maneuvering around lasers. Besides," and this part sounded almost sheepish, "I cannot distinguish the lasers well enough to navigate them. They appear to my eyes as a dark, translucent brown."

This was bad. On the one hand, that kind of concentration wasn't Jack's thing at all. She was the kind of biotic who spent their time smashing walls and throwing people, rather than meticulously moving objects through small areas. The slightest mistake (which she was damned sure she'd end up making) would set off the alarms, and then they'd have guards and Kelham would be alerted to their presence, and they might not find Kolyat.

On the other hand...Jack bit her lip, glancing down at the lovingly-polished tile floor. If she didn't do this, they would _definitely_ not find Kolyat. After Thane had anchored her through Pragia, she would be letting him down, and that was _not fucking acceptable_. Jack's first rule of working with a group (learned from experience, naturally) was that you pulled your weight at all times, and if you couldn't keep up with the rest of the crew, it'd end with them divvying up your possessions and recruiting someone competent to replace your smoldering corpse. Thane had done right by her, and she was determined to return the favor, to prove to him that he hadn't made a mistake by going out of his way to help her. (Was this what it felt like to be part of a team? Like, really part of one, with the whole teamwork thing going on? She'd sure as hell never thought this way about anybody before. Maybe it was just how normal people felt about having a _friend_; those had been in even shorter supply than teams.)

Quick as a flash, the data module leapt from the thief's hand in a blue cloud and floated in the air between the three of them. Jack tilted her head from side to side, maneuvering it around tentatively. "Lemme work this out first," she muttered. At first, the small cylinder jerked around spasmodically in the air, moving much too fast to properly steer. She growled in frustration, and focused hard on keeping it as still as possible; after a minute or so of concentration, it had finally slowed down to the occasional quiver.

Thane surveyed the main hall from his position by the doorframe, studying the rafters with the eye of a trained professional. "I see movement near the ceiling," he reported, raising a pistol. "Security cameras, most likely."

"Worse: motion detectors." Their host was busy pulling a metal rod out of her pouch, extending it to its full length with the precise fingers of a master thief. "I was hoping, since the two of us will be busy dealing with the lasers, that you'd take care of those for me."

Having studied the movement patterns for six seconds, Thane had already ducked back into the room as she talked. He pulled the slide back on one pistol and activated the suppressor clamps...

---_a gentle whirr of gears in the darkness. The machine comes to a halt directly between the painting of the woman in the crimson dress and the Malvado original sculpture, it halts: one-Kalihira, two-Kalihira, three-Kalihira, and its motor drones again in the opposite direction. Across the room, directly adjacent to the chandelier, a second detector comes to a halt---_

"There's five of them," the thief continued, "one on the upper---"

Thane leaned out of the doorway, raising his pistol into the darkness.

_Blam. Blam. Blam. Blam. Blam._

With the shots still echoing around the foyer, he leaned back in, ejected the heatsink, and nodded to the two women. "It is done."

Across the room, Jack barely smothered a snicker.

He had the benefit of seeing the stranger's expression go from 'entirely collected professional' to 'what the christ did you just do' in half a second flat. "That's...what did..."she stammered, briefly losing her cool before clamming back up. "Er...well, nicely done. You're as good as they say you are."

"The best." There was no bragging in the drell's rippling voice; it was a statement of fact.

"If you're done making me feel fuckin' _insecure_ over here," Jack spoke up, with a sarcastically exaggerated sense of long-suffering in her tone, "I think I've got the hang of it." Oddly enough, it had been thinking of Samara that helped her get a handle on precise, delicate movements with the module. The asari was no friend of Jack's, certainly (she acted like a turian cruiser had jammed itself up her ass at mach three, and even if it weren't for the justicar thing, she was fucking _creepy_ on her own), but thinking of the serene but intense expression she always wore helped to get into the kind of mindset that would be necessary for focused biotic manipulation. Carefully, Jack moved to the door and reached out a hand to tentatively hover the module into the field of lasers. It hung there, penetrated only a meter or so deep into the maze of red light, and barely quivered; she breathed a sigh of relief, keeping as focused as possible.

"Good...._good_." Quick as a flash, the thief joined them in the doorway and knelt beside Jack, unfolding the end of the rod she held to reveal an intricate mirror on a stick. She pushed the mirrored end through the doorway, keeping it flush with the floor, and studied the other end of the room's reflection. "That's perfect. All right, here we go...I need you to move it to your left, nice and slow, until I tell you to stop."

Squeezing her eyes shut, Jack focused on her link to the biotic field around the data module. Once it moved past the doorframe, she wouldn't be able to see it anymore and would have to rely entirely on her instincts. Sweat beaded on her forehead as she directed the module to the left, trying to keep it steady in the air. After a second, it passed out of the group's sight.

The hooded woman followed along via her mirror, and raised a hand shortly after the module vanished. "All right, stop. Rotate forty-five degrees counter-clockwise and move it towards you."

"...Layman's terms," Jack hissed, clearly trying to maintain her concentration. She could feel the silver cylinder wobbling in midair, and tried desperately to keep it from falling and triggering the lasers.

"All right." A short sigh preceded the revised instructions. "Lift the back end up...more...more...careful, you're shaking a bit there."

"I _know_ that." It was definitely wobbling now, and there was no way she'd be able to keep it in the air at this rate. They were going to have to fight security mechs, the way this was going---

A hand on her shoulder. "Hold fast." It was Thane's voice, unexpectedly, a gravelly whisper in her ear. "Clear the turmoil from your soul and focus only on the movement. Nothing else exists."

Jack blew out another breath, making a concerted effort to do as he said. She lowered her shoulders a bit, relaxing the muscles that had clenched in her arms, and turned her mind back towards the tiny field she was maintaining in the other room. The more she relaxed, the more she began to understand the serenity in Samara's expression that she had been trying to emulate. Anger had a hell of an effect on biotics, certainly, but this kind of focus could result in an impressive amount of control. All she had to do was stay calm, and with Thane's presence as a mitigating factor, it looked like a very doable goal.

"Have you stabilized, _siha_?" His voice had a touch of concern in it, belying a core of confidence that his approach had worked. Jack figured she had to have visibly relaxed enough for him to suspect that much.

"Stabilized?" The thief whistled, clearly impressed. "That's an understatement. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it, and...move it in a backwards N-shape, from right to left."

Easy...easy...it was a complicated maneuver, but if she visualized the path in her head and then gently pulled her mental image of the data module along it, the task was doable. With a controlled swish of her hand, Jack finished off the N-shape, then, following further orders, navigated the module through what felt like a complex vertical fence of beams, all the while heading closer to the back wall (and, presumably, their goal).

It felt like an eternity had passed by the time she finally heard: "Okay, you're right at the end. Rotate ninety degrees horizontal, then pull it back nice and steady so it slots into the computer port." Although the other woman's voice was smooth and unruffled as always, Jack could hear hints of excitement just under her composure. They were almost there...

"Not so fast, slow it up a bit. Twist a little to the left and line up the plugs..."

Thane said nothing, but his grip tightened very slightly on her shoulder.

"All right, now ease it back...good..._almost_..."

Only after the module clicked into place, after she felt the _rightness_ of its position in the computer, did Jack realize that she had been holding her breath for the duration of the insertion. She leaned hard against the doorframe, panting from exertion and lack of air, and wiped what felt like a bucketful of sweat off her scalp before flashing a grin up at Thane; the assassin, ever demure, offered a proud smile in return.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the hooded stranger announced, tapping away at one of her omni-tools, "we...are _in_."

In a single concerted whoosh, the laser grid blinked out of existence, and an overhead light flicked on in its place, dimly illuminating the main hall. The trio strode in (Thane having paused to help Jack up to her feet) and, in short order, made their way across the hall to a holo depicting an abstract, three-dimensional work of art.

The thief studied Forta's work for a moment, one gloved hand to her chin. "Hrm," she finally exclaimed. "Not even that special-looking, now that I get a chance to really study it." After a moment of further contemplation, she gave a pragmatic shrug. "Oh well. Getting to it was the fun I was after anyway, and it'll look nice on my wall. Thanks for the help, you two."

"Gladly," Thane answered. "I take it Kelham's upstairs?"

"Yes. He should be in his bedroom this time of night, I imagine. There aren't any security mechs, besides the ones that patrol outside, so it should be smooth sailing."

"Excellent. Thank you for your assistance." The drell turned and headed towards a grand, pretentious staircase that headed up to the second floor. Jack followed after him, pausing to nod at their host.

"Maybe we'll meet again someday," the woman called after them, already leaning over the holo and unscrewing it from the wall with some kind of bizarre drill. "I wouldn't mind working with you again if you ever decide to try larceny full-time. And by the way...my name is Kasumi. I think you've earned that, at least."

"I'm well aware of who you are, Ms. Goto," Thane replied over his shoulder. He didn't bother to turn as he ascended the staircase. "You may be interested to hear that you're not the only person with sources."

The echoes of a delighted chuckle followed them all the way up the stairs.

* * *

"That was masterfully handled, despite the intense concentration it required," Thane said, looking over at Jack as they entered the antechamber to Elias Kelham's bedroom. "You are a formidable woman, _siha_, and every day it appears I learn this in a refreshingly new way."

The convict was not at all ready to discuss that. "Yeah, it was something else," she answered dismissively, her voice dropping to a whisper when the reinforced steel doors came into sight. "So how do you wanna do this? I can have the door down in half a second, then we can kick his ass till he sings if you want."

Thane rubbed at his chin. "I'm not sure he would respond well to a simple beating," he mused. "Perhaps we should come at him with different approaches...confuse his mind so that he becomes susceptible to repeated questioning."

"Ah, the old 'bad cop, worse cop' routine." Jack cracked her knuckles. "You act all cold and professional and I'll be the raging psycho-bitch...so basically, the usual."

"Very well." He nodded, and turned to eye the doors.

"Just remember," Jack added, "we don't have the time to drag this out. Your son could be about to shoot some bastard, for all we know."

"I am keenly aware. Open the door, if you would."

He was already aware of what Jack's interpretation of that command would be, but nothing really prepares a person for seeing six hundred pounds of steel explode off their hinges in an explosion of blue energy. The assassin's first thought was that the doors ran a risk of crushing Kelham if they flew too far in, but apparently Jack had already thought of that, and the ruined metal hulks simply toppled inwards, where they lay in a tangled ruin amidst the lush carpeting and the shattered remains of a desk.

The man of the hour, thankfully, had not been standing next to the doors when Jack blasted them open; in fact, he was currently half-out of the bed in his unmentionables (boxers, black silk with gaudy red flames. Thane quietly cursed his eidetic memory), looking thoroughly dazed and bewildered. However, he caught sight of his two visitors as they strode toward his downed form, and to his credit, he reacted instantly. Their appearance and method of entry meant they obviously weren't C-Sec, and from the look of them, they were definitely professionals. Kelham settled on the most likely possibility and ran with it.

"Whatever Talid's paying you, I'll double it," he said, doing an admirable job of keeping his voice calm.

Jack could see the human slowly reaching towards his nightstand; whether to pull a weapon or trigger a silent alarm, she didn't know, but there was no sense in finding out. She took a quick step towards him and slammed a boot down on his wrist, pinning the offending arm to the floor, then leveled her shotgun with his face. "We're not interested in your money, you slimy little fuck," she hissed. "What we're after is _information_, and you're going to give it to us."

Behind her, Thane saw his cue and circled around to Kelham's other side, his hands clasped behind his back. "My associate and I won't waste your time with threats of mutilation to your body, Mr. Kelham--"

"Speak for yourself."

"--at least, I won't," he continued, amusement briefly flickering over his features. "You understand, of course, that we have less time than I would like, and I can't always restrain her when she gets this way."

The crime boss was proving to be a tougher nut to crack than expected, because the only reaction this show of strength produced from him was a derisive smirk. "All right, look, frog-boy," he drawled, "stop wasting my time and ask the question so I can tell you to fuck off. If you were here to kill me, you'd have done it already, so get on with it."

"You hired an assassin recently." The drell turned and took a few steps, facing away from Kelham and Jack. "Who is your target?"

"It's Councillor Udina," Kelham answered, rather dryly. "He owes me two hundred credits."

Jack hit him. It was supposed to be just a love tap on the forehead with the butt of her shotgun, but it must have come out a bit harder than she expected, because the man's eyes rolled back for a second, and his head swayed back and forth. "Wha....the hell was that?!" he exclaimed. "You're not supposed--"

"You're gonna get one of those every time you give my _associate_ a smartass answer," the convict growled.

"Lady," Kelham snorted, "if they're all like that one was, I can give two more smartass answers and be _unconscious_. Then what'll you do?"

Seeing Thane about to speak up (and presumably direct the conversation in a less immediately threatening direction), Jack leaned down just enough to get in Kelham's face, and growled at him: "Didn't say all those shots would be to your forehead."

That was somewhat more effective. The man quailed, glancing towards the door in hopes that security mechs would be coming to his rescue. (No such luck.) "You think you're safe just because you're on my side of the law?" he spat, beginning to look a bit frantic. "I've got contacts in C-Sec too, you know. One word from me and they'll make sure you two share a cell with the biggest, most well-hung krogan on Purgatory."

"News travels slowly, apparently," Thane mused. He leaned down into Kelham's field of vision, smoothing his collar with both hands. "Purgatory's been gone for about a month, Mr. Kelham."

"...what? Since when?"

At the sight of their mark's nonplussed state, Jack and Thane exchanged a quick, knowing look, and then the former grinned viciously. "Since I escaped from cryo and _blew it the fuck up_." She lowered the shotgun, letting the barrel rest against his eyes (which, incidentally, were now very wide), and tapped her free hand against the prison tattoos crudely inked on her neck. "Between him and me, we've killed more people than the Stygian rot. So if you wanna take your chances with us, shit, I'm not complaining, but--"

"Joram Talid!" Kelham blurted, his attention focused entirely on the shotgun. "The target's Joram Talid; he's a turian politican over in Zakera. Just get her off me!"

At Thane's signal, the convict stepped away, slinging her weapon back over one shoulder. "Knew you'd see reason eventually," she smirked.

"Reason," he spat bitterly. "Look, it doesn't matter what you're after with the assassin, that turian bastard has it coming. He's been shaking down human businesses in his end of the wards, trying to run our entire species out. If he gets into office, we're fucked."

"I take it your brand of corruption is morally superior to his, then," Thane said, with a dry hint of sarcasm in his voice.

"You're damn right it is! You know how many jobs I'm providing in Shin Akiba, and how many of them I protect at the expense of [i]my[/i] syndicate?" Kelham glared. "I'm practically a community organizer, and Talid's just a racist asshole looking to run humans off the Citadel because we bailed them out against the geth."

Jack pulled lightly on Thane's arm. "We don't have time for this shit. Your son's probably closing in on Talid right now."

"I pray that we aren't too late," the assassin agreed as they turned to hurry down the steps. "If I should fail to save Kolyat, I...no. Best not to even consider that possibility at this point."

Kasumi was long gone by the time they reached the main hall again, which was no surprise, and she had decided not to stop at the holo and relieved Kelham of half his gallery, which was not much of a shock either.

"Joram Talid lives in the 800 blocks," Tali chirped in Thane's earpiece. "Shepard and Garrus have finished up with their mission; I'll send word to them to head that way and help you with the interception."

"..Thank you, Tali," the drell responded. His shoulders slumped, and a fist clenched by his side. "The 800 blocks...that's almost a forty-five minute walk from here, even using the elevator. We would never make it in time to find Kolyat."

Jack grinned like a Cheshire cat, sidling up next to him and waving a pilfered remote. "Good thing we're not walking," she chortled. "I snatched the remote to Kelham's corvette on the way out of the bedroom. Garage is down the hall."

"_Siha_, you continually find new ways to amaze me." The relief in his voice was palpable, and within a second the two were already running towards the garage. "Arashu has truly smiled upon us today."

"If that means I get to drive," Jack answered, "then _amen_."

* * *

**To be continued...**


	10. Chapter 10

Mass Effect is the property of Bioware.

**A/N: **We've got about four chapters left. Thanks for sticking with me this far, guys; I love y'all. (I've got my thesis defense next month, oh god oh god oh god) This chapter was a monster. I rewrote it _five times_ and I'm still not satisfied with it, quite frankly (particularly how long it went), but I didn't want to delay updating any further.

Been thinking about what, if anything, I want to write after this, and I have a few ideas I've been kicking around. Stay tuned, I suppose.

* * *

**Ten**

Each of the Citadel's wards is contained in a separate 'arm', forming a kind of spiderweb around the Presidium. In order to travel between them, it is necessary to use the freeway that runs in a ring around the center, which meant it took exactly five minutes to get from the Presidium down to Zakera ward, owing partly to the fact that traffic was blessedly light and partly to Jack's driving (which could be described as somewhere approaching 'maniacal'). Kelham's shuttle was a top-of-the-line X3M corvette, souped up to all hell, and the convict was pleased to find that it handled like a beauty. She swerved towards the Zakera exit, cutting off a volus who shook his fist impotently, and hovered down into the 200 block.

Thane, who had been clinging frantically to the transport's safety harness the entire time, spoke up. "We should start searching in the area around Joram Talid's apartment," he suggested. "Drop me off in the 700 block, then head straight for the apartment complex and look around the area. I don't think Shepard and Garrus will get here in time...we'll have to be quick." His eyes scanned the streets below them, futilely trying to lift any semblance of detail out of the faceless crowd.

"All right." Jack brought the shuttle down towards the streets, passing just over the 700 block. She turned to glance at the assassin as he stood up. "I'll floor it over there and case the place. Look, we're going to find him, all right?" There was a certain frantic tinge to Thane's voice, a subtle desperation in his movements and posture, that made her want to reassure him. He'd been the stable one throughout all their interactions, and if he was about to freak out, that didn't bode well for her either. "Just stay calm, treat it like another job, and don't get excited. You could miss something if you're not focused, and it could bite us in the ass."

"Understood...and thank you. Good hunting." He swung a leg over the corvette's side door, secured the earpiece on his comm unit, and dropped to the street below. As soon as he hit the ground, Thane broke into a sprint that took him down the street and straight through the crowds milling around the 700 block. Jack could faintly make out his form weaving in between passersby, a tiny green blur darting through the shifting mass of life.

"Amonkira, Lord of Hunters," his voice echoed in her earpiece. "Grant that my hands be steady, my aim be true, and my feet be swift."

She hit the gas, sending the shuttle roaring overhead. The 800 blocks were three minutes' drive at most, at the speed she was going, and assuming there weren't any C-Sec looking to make their traffic quota. Thane had mentioned that his son was teal-colored, and would be about five years younger than she was by now, meaning he'd at least be easy to pick out in a crowd. If Kolyat was as new to this as she'd been told, maybe he'd fuck up, make a rookie mistake that made him easy to spot...but even if he didn't, she had to find him.

"And should the worst come to pass..."

Jack didn't know what the hell she felt for Thane Krios. For all intents and purposes she shouldn't be able to _stand_ the guy, and yet here they were as...something. ("Friends?", certainly, but they had long since moved past that question mark.) It wasn't a road she'd gone down for as long as she could remember, and the journey so far had taught her that stepping out of one's comfort zone was a lot more intimidating than staring down the barrel of a krogan's assault rifle. (The krogan, at least, could be hit with a singularity.) And all the way, he'd been patient, understanding, willing to trust her even after she'd given him the 'shorter knife' speech.

There was no way in hell she was going to let him down on this one.

"..._grant me forgiveness._"

The shuttle rocketed towards the 800 block, its thrusters burning at full blast as it headed straight for Joram Talid's residence.

* * *

Thane was already working at several disadvantages. One, he reasoned as he pushed past two salarians and skulked around a darkened corner, was that he had only a vague idea what Talid looked like. Several holos from the turian's election campaign were on display in the wards, but they had obviously been digitally enhanced to make him look like an angular Adonis, and not nearly as reliable as he'd prefer. Still, beggars couldn't be choosers...the image was all he would have to go on in terms of _looks_, certainly, but there would be other tells. Election day was coming soon and any politician worth his salt would be well-dressed, well-guarded, and probably pandering to a crowd.

He paused next to an elcor that was ensconced in an extranet ATM, leaning out to look around at the crowd on a nearby sidewalk. If Kolyat was around, he would be trying to find Talid as well...unless he'd already spotted the turian, in which case he would be close by. Thane's eyes flicked up to the walkways that lined the top of the ward—if this were one of _his_ jobs, he would use them as a vantage point. Kolyat was an amateur, so it wasn't a given that he would think of that...but it was definitely worth a try.

"Apologetic: I wasn't aware you were in line," said the startled elcor, noticing Thane next to it. "Sorry for holding you up."

"Not a problem," the assassin answered. "I wasn't in line. Take your time."

As the elcor turned its attention back to the screen, Thane leapt at the wall holding the ATM, his hands finding purchase in the ridges that were common in asari street design. He swiftly scrambled up the side of the wall and slid over the railing onto one of the walkways. The elcor's girth had blocked any initial view of him on the street, and he had climbed quickly enough to avoid detection, judging from the lack of pointing and gaping from anyone on the street. Standing, Thane hurried down the walkway, looking over the 700 block's streets for any sign of Kolyat or Talid.

His earpiece crackled. "Jack here. I ditched the shuttle and I'm checking out the apartments. No sign of any drell."

"This is Shepard," came a familiar voice in his other ear. "We've just landed in the 500 block. It's going to be about fifteen minutes before we can make it to your position. Where do you want to rendezvous?"

Hrm. He could use two extra pairs of eyes, certainly, but getting Garrus and Shepard up here would be an entirely different story, particularly if C-Sec got involved. Best to operate on his own, the way he'd always done.

"Head to Jack's location," he answered. "I'll keep an eye out for the mark."

Almost on cue, fate stepped in and intervened so handily that Thane could have sworn it was the work of the goddesses. A pair of armored krogan just up the street caught his gaze, and lo and behold, between them was a sharply-dressed turian whose self-important strut practically radiated smugness. He was able to get a straight-on glimpse of the turian's face as the entourage passed under the walkway and---

_---mandibles pulled into a confident smirk, a strong jaw trailing into a face devoid of markings, cold mahogany eyes dissecting everything around him---_

Perfect.

He tapped the comm unit. "This is Thane. I've spotted Joram Talid; he's at the end of the 700 block with two bodyguards and heading towards Jack's location. I'll follow and keep an eye out for Kolyat."

"Wait, Joram Talid's the target?" Garrus asked. "Are you sure we have to save that barefaced snake? The way he carries on, he's making the rest of the races nervous about 'turian supremacists'--plus everybody already knows he's not much more than a shakedown man."

"You're damn right we do." Jack's glare was practically audible in her voice. "Stop pissing and moaning about race relations and get your ass over here."

Ah, Jack. Thane suppressed a smile as he trailed the turian from overhead. She was so quick to jump to his defense, even against slights that were only perceived. Likely, she hadn't had any real friends until he came along, and particularly with their relationship upgrade (from "friends" to "whatever-they-were"), she had become progressively more determined to watch out for him. It was odd; Jack was the last person on the SR2 that came to mind at the thought of loyalty or trustworthiness, but once you won her over, she stuck with you to the end. Truly worthy of the _siha_ title, though certainly in an unconventional way.

Beneath him, Talid was discussing the upcoming election with a small group of voters, specifically two asari and a hanar. "The way Intendant Valys has been running Zakera," he insisted, "we'll have a human majority within the next four years! We have to step in and make it clear to the zoning committee that we won't stand for this kind of relocation policy. What would you do if your next-door neighbors turned out to be pushy humans, playing their loud music, watching their trashy vids on the holo?"

"This one would politely ask them to be quieter," the hanar began, "and also inquire as to whether they had heard the truth of the Enkindlers--"

"You'd be outraged!" Talid continued, completely ignoring the answer. "It's been less than a century since these simians came onto the galactic scene, and already they've bullied their way into a spot on the Council, ahead of more _deserving_ races, like the volus, hanar, and elcor! How many more of these insults do you expect to tolerate?"

A quick glance down at the krogan bodyguards revealed that the situation was worse than Thane had thought. The krogan were clearly professionally-trained, given the way they stood and their surveillance of Talid's immediate surroundings, but it was obvious that they weren't expecting to encounter any danger in the wards from their lazy posture and bored expressions. If Kolyat played his cards right and attacked from a distance, or chose to trail Talid from the shadows, the bodyguards would never spot him. There wasn't much hope of being tipped off by their reactions, which meant he was on his own when it came to spotting Kolyat.

...unless the boy was already waiting in ambush.

"No sign of Kolyat yet," he said into the comm. "Have you found any trace of him?"

"Nothing," Jack growled. "I checked the lobby, all the alleys around the building, the upper walkway in case he decided to try sniping, and most of the street, and I didn't find shit."

"Stay alert, Jack." Thane vaulted a rail and hurried down the street, gauging the distance; at this rate, Talid and company would arrive home within the next five minutes—faster than Shepard and Garrus could get there. That meant when Kolyat struck, it would be entirely up to Thane and Jack to spot him and foil the assassination attempt. Not good odds. "We're inbound to your position...the target will be arriving shortly, and I expect that Kolyat will make his move before Talid gets inside."

The drell hurried to keep up, staying just above the krogan bodyguards, and drew a pistol. If need be...if the worst came to pass, and they couldn't stop Kolyat, Thane was prepared to do everything in his power to make it look like it was he who had committed the assassination. He would still have failed his son, letting him become a murderer, but at least he would be able to shield him from the repercussions of committing the act.

He prayed, as he'd never prayed before, that it wouldn't come to that.

The krogan were visible long before their boss was, which made it easy enough for Jack to watch the procession making its way towards her. She took up a spot under a lighting beacon, carefully chosen so as to maximize her view of the street, and watched Talid strut his way towards the apartment building, looking fresh off a high from whipping voters into a frenzy. There wasn't any suspicious movement in the crowd yet, but she'd already checked every available part of the apartment building's ground floor; if Kolyat was going to make his move, it was going to be between now and the moment that the turian entered the complex.

"Keep checking the walkways," she ordered. "Trying to take two krogan at ground level would be suicide; he's probably gonna use a sniper rifle and find some high ground."

"That's what I'd do," Thane answered. His voice was pensive, a thoughtful rasp in her ear. "You?"

"I'd, uh, take the krogan at ground level." Jack coughed. "But I'd be able to _do_ it, unlike your kid, 'cause I guarantee you when it comes to biotics, my dick is bigger than his. So keep an eye on the walkways and---"

_Wait_.

A figure in the crowd caught Jack's eyes; it hadn't done anything more than walking yet, but the purposeful way in which it strode towards Talid implied _intent_. It wasn't just a turian wanting to shake his hand, the body shape wasn't right for that. A black overcoat was blocking any view she might have had of its face, so there was no way to get a positive ID, but better safe than sorry.

"..._Siha_?" Thane asked, a note of urgency in his voice.

Jack realized she'd trailed off in mid-sentence. "There's somebody approaching from Talid's back left," she answered. "I can't see his face, but he's moving like he wants to get there in a hurry."

"I'll try to get a look at him from up here."

"He's moving onto the sidewalk now..." Just then, the overcoat was pulled away, exposing a teal-skinned drell. He reached into the front pocket of his coat with a shaking hand, stalking towards Talid's back. Jack's eyes widened. "Shit! It's him, Krios! He's going for it!"

She could see a flash of movement up on one of the walkways, and the glimmer of a lens in the light. Thane was peering through the scope on his pistol, by the looks of it. "Yes...yes, that's Kolyat!" he exclaimed.

The young drell was stealthily advancing on Talid's back, and neither of the krogan noticed him. He could shoot Talid and run away for sure if someone didn't intervene...and sure enough, the hand that was wrist deep in his coat came out with a wicked-looking Carnifex pistol.

Thane's voice was frantic over the comm. "There's no time to separate them," he ordered. "_Siha_! Stop him, quickly!"

There was maybe two seconds, at most, in which to react. Two and a half decades worth of combat-trained reflexes took over, and Jack reacted in tune with her well-honed instincts, attempting to prevent Kolyat from getting a shot off.

Unfortunately, instinct and experience dictated that the best way to do so was to biotically uproot a Tupari machine and throw it at him.

About a second after the drink machine left her biotic field, Jack realized that while the attack would be a warning shot to someone of her caliber, Kolyat Krios was an untrained amateur, probably terrified, and most likely experiencing tunnel vision. Cursing her impulsive way of reacting, she managed a "Heads up, kid!" at him, and to the drell's credit, he managed to dodge the attack. With that said, his dodge mostly consisted of screaming and falling over, narrowly avoiding being clipped by the flying obstacle, and alerting Talid and both krogan (who upon turning around and noticing a drell with a gun, jumped to the obvious, and correct, conclusion).

"Call C-Sec!" the krogan on the left shouted, raising his rifle. "Get them out h--" He trailed off into a wordless bellow as Kolyat peppered his face with Carnifex rounds, and collapsed in a heap against a bench, clawing at the wounds. The other bodyguard, having been caught just as off guard as his fellow, didn't fare any better: a gunshot handily relieved him of his rifle and three fingers, and four subsequent shots to the chest put him on the floor. Jack blinked, impressed despite the severity of the situation; the kid was a crack shot, even if he didn't have his father's experience. Genetics went a long way.

Talid had stumbled awkwardly at the sound of the gunshots, and he dragged himself upright and made a mad dash for the apartment complex as the guards went down. The turian cleared the doors just in time to dodge a shot that would've likely passed through his lung, and charged blindly into the lobby. Kolyat was close behind him, already shoving a fresh heatsink into his Carnifex.

Jack was vaguely aware of Thane next to her as she dashed after the two. "In here!" she called, bringing her shotgun to bear. "Where the fuck _are_ you two?"

"Almost there!" Garrus protested. "We just got to the 600 block; we're right behind you!"

Thane hurried ahead and barreled through the door ahead of her, pistol at the ready. They rushed into the lobby and glanced toward the stairs, the most likely place a would-be assassin would run for if cornered...only Kolyat hadn't made for the stairs. There he was, right in the middle of the (thankfully empty) lobby, with Joram Talid on his knees and the barrel of his gun pressed against the back of the turian's head. He must have frozen up and decided to make his stand there, hoping to negotiate his way out, instead of doing the smart thing and bailing out.

"Hold it right there!" he growled, shoving the gun harder against Talid's head. "Take another step and I'll blow him to hell! Both of you back off, and---"

Thane stepped forward, lifting a hand in supplication. "Kolyat. You don't have to do this."

If it were at all possible for a scaled species to totally blanch, Jack could have sworn she saw Kolyat do so. He stammered incoherently for a second, a disbelieving glare fixed on his father, and finally choked out: "Is...is this some kind of _joke_? Now, _now_ you show up?! What the hell are you doing?"

"Listen to me," Thane implored. "You haven't done anything serious yet. We can fix all of this, just come with me and we'll talk to C-Sec about it."

"No way that's happening!" Kolyat snarled. He took half a step back, his eyes flitting down to Talid. "I'm walking out of here and he's coming with me, or else we---"

Jack hoisted her shotgun and blew the turian's face off.

Dead silence hung in the room as Talid slumped to the ground, leaving Kolyat wide-eyed, trembling, and absolutely splattered with dark blue gore and chunks of bone.

"..._oh my gods_," he squeaked.

"Got a backup plan, kid?" the convict deadpanned.

"I..." The younger drell swayed, his gun dropping to the floor. He looked like he was about to throw up, either from panic, disgust, or both.

Jack gestured at the corpse. "Yeah, _that's_ what it looks like." It was fairly easy, once you had been in 'the life' long enough, to pick out when someone had never seen death before. Not clinical, funereal death, but the raw, visceral end that people came to long before the undertaker took them away. She had most often seen it when someone in her running crew made their first kill; the reaction was usually not unlike Kolyat's. "If you don't wanna get used to that shit, I suggest you listen to what your old man has to say."

"That...might have been somewhat extreme, _siha_," Thane whispered.

She shrugged. "Eh, the lesson'll stay with him. Go talk to your boy, Krios."

"Thank you." He took a cautious step towards his son. "Kolyat...I know there's--"

"C-Sec! Hands in the air!"

Son of a _bitch_.

Three uniformed officers had entered behind them, weapons drawn and ready. Their leader was a weathered-looking man with captain's stripes on his uniform, who grimaced at the sight of the dead turian surrounded by armed strangers. "Aw, shit," he exclaimed, "we've got a real snafu here. All right, all of you drop your weapons and get your hands over your heads!"

Jack's fingered tightened on the trigger of her Katana. She was more than prepared to shoot it out with the C-Sec group, but when she caught Thane's eye, the drell shook his head meaningfully. Either he was interested in minimizing casualties, or he thought he could talk his way out of this one. Grudgingly, Jack set her shotgun down and raised her arms.

"Jayden, head over there and check them for contraband," the captain ordered. "Christ in a Carnifex, we've got two injured krogan outside and a dead intendant candidate in here. Get these three down to the station and we'll find out just who's responsible for this."

"I am!"

A new voice rang out, and everyone's heads turned, looking across the lobby to its owner. There, framed in a side door with a sniper rifle slung over his shoulder and a familiar turian at his back, was--

"Commander Shepard?!" the C-Sec captain exclaimed. "Wha...what're you doing here?"

"Just taking care of some problems in the Wards," Shepard answered, striding across the room to shake the man's hand. "Good to see you, Captain Bailey. You're just in time; my squad here found Joram Talid shaking down human-run businesses in Zakera."

"Well, that sounds about right," Bailey admitted. "It's no secret Talid was a grade-A scumbag, and he sure detested humans. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy."

Shepard nodded, gesturing to the tableaux in front of them. "So they chased him here, but he took my friend's son hostage--" (and here he indicated Kolyat with a wave of his hand) "--and it was fortunate that my SIC here managed to score a headshot on him before he could use that pistol."

"Sometimes you get lucky," Garrus supplied helpfully.

It was a pretty obvious cover-up, and judging from Bailey's expression, he hadn't been fooled in the slightest. Still, it would look good enough on the official report, Talid's death was no skin off his nose, and most importantly, Shepard was a Spectre, meaning his authority trumped anything C-Sec had to say. "Good thing you arrived when you did, then," he said, playing along. "All right, boys, you heard the Commander. No need to book these three; go call the medics for the krogan and the coroner for Talid."

"Thanks," Shepard said amiably, heading to the front door alongside the captain. "I'll send C-Sec a copy of my report to the Council, if that helps any."

Bailey smiled. "That'd be perfect. In fact, maybe I could interest you in some tickets to this year's C-Sec charity ball, assuming you're not on a mission at the time..." His voice trailed off as the two followed the patrolmen out of the lobby.

Garrus stayed silent, but threw Jack and Thane a wink on his way out.

As the doors slammed shut again, Jack felt her shoulders relax. It was nice to be implicitly trusted; naïve as Shepard could be sometimes, he really did give her some much-needed wiggle room when it came to taking care of missions. He'd covered for her and Thane pretty aptly.

Thane turned back to his son, who had been shaking like a leaf throughout the entire C-Sec debacle. "Listen," he began, willing himself to come within a few paces of Kolyat. "I know you're angry with me. I...I wasn't there when your mother died, and---"

Finally, the kid seemed to get a spine, as that particular comment triggered a torrent of bitter rage. "When she _died_?" Kolyat hissed. "Why stop there? You weren't even around when she was _alive_!"

"I know." The assassin hung his head. "I failed you, just as I failed her."

If anything, that admission only made the young drell angrier. "Looking back, I don't understand why she stayed so loyal to you," he spat, his lips twisting in a contemptuous snarl. "You were always gone, so busy with work that you couldn't bother to come home more than...what, twice a year? Do you have any idea how it felt to be the only company Mother had on her birthday, seeing that hopeful look in her eyes fall apart when you never walked through the door? Having to make something up when people asked me what my father did, because you weren't around long enough to tell me?" Both fists clenched at his side. "Mother always told people you were a missionary for the hanar, and all this time you were out _killing people_...and you couldn't even stop long enough to show up for her funeral--"

"It was my fault," Thane blurted out. "Her death was my fault."

Kolyat's eyes widened, and his back stiffened abruptly. "What? How is that even possible?"

"Her murderers were enemies of mine," Thane confessed, his shoulders quaking slightly. "They were seeking revenge for a hit I'd carried out, and...they killed your mother to get to me." His voice took on an icy sheen, and the assassin shined through in his words. "When I found out, I hunted them down: the ringleaders, the triggermen, anyone who was involved. I hurt them. Killed them..._eventually_." Thane's head raised, his eyes meeting Kolyat's once more. "By the time I returned...you had grown. Moved on. I didn't deserve to be a part of your life anymore, not when I had failed you so completely."

Jack chewed her lip, watching nervously. She felt like she was intruding on an incredibly intimate moment: the revelation that as much as Thane had it together, as steady of an anchor as he'd been through the past month...he was still just as fucked up as she was, in his own way. And yet, beneath the discomfort that thought engendered, it was oddly relieving. It humanized him in a way that she'd never considered, and made her feel just a little closer. Of course he'd been able to help her: _he knew what she'd felt like_. He knew how it felt to cut yourself off from everyone, to throw society behind you and live in a world where you could only trust yourself. He knew what it was like to have someone get close to you, only to be torn away at the whim of a bullet.

Whatever it was that surged in her chest at that moment, she didn't want to think about it right then.

"I...I don't know what to say," Kolyat said flatly, his mouth open with disbelief. He sounded defeated, almost. Certainly weary, and probably emotionally drained at this point.

Taking a step towards the pair, Jack laid a hand on Thane's shoulder and pressed lightly against his side. Her fingers kneaded at the muscle under his coat reassuringly. "Look," she began, turning an eye on Kolyat, "your old man's made mistakes...but he's trying to help you. Don't let him spend the time he's got left without at least making sure you're all right."

Thane seemed spurred on by her words; his muscles tightened under her hand, and he swallowed hard before continuing. "Kolyat, I've taken many bad things out of this galaxy." A tear trickled out of the corner of his eye, racing down his cheek. "You're the only good thing I've ever added to it. Please...let me try to help you through this, at least. To be, in some small part, the father I never was."

The world seemed to stop for a moment as he paused. Kolyat hesitated, looking torn between bursting into tears and going back on a shouting tirade. For a second it seemed as if he was about to turn and run...and then finally, he tentatively stepped forward and embraced his father, tears likewise pouring down his face.

Jack stepped back, letting Thane have his moment. Looking over the hug, she found herself feeling as if she'd done the right thing, for the first time in as long as she could remember...and for the first time in even longer, feeling genuinely good about herself.

* * *

Much later that night, they finished 'debriefing' down in the life support room. Thane sat at his desk, with the redness around his eyelids already clearing up, and Jack was perched on the desk itself looking down at him. His right hand was pressed to her left, their fingers intertwined as they talked.

"Commander Shepard was able to convince the captain to give Kolyat a job in C-Sec, in order to keep him out of future trouble," the drell was saying. "Both of them have done much for me, _siha_, as have you." He squeezed her hand gently.

Jack grinned lopsidedly. "I owed you for Pragia, and our date didn't change that," she answered. "Just glad you fixed things with your son...seems like it did you a lotta good."

"I don't think things will ever truly be 'fixed' between us." Thane's eyes were grave, with a measure of sadness behind his gaze. "Perhaps with more time, we might be able to make things right, but all I can hope for is to repair our relationship as much as possible before I return to the sea. Still...that is more than I could have hoped for, and for that you have my gratitude." The ghost of a smile returned to his face as he looked up to meet her eyes. "Perhaps you care more about people than you let on."

"It's not...I didn't, really," she admitted, shifting a bit from discomfort. "It's just that I thought about what you said...about trust, and about really _knowing_ someone. And I thought maybe it'd be worth it, if..." Jack trailed off, her eyes suddenly stinging. She furiously blinked the sensation away (no small task, with eyelashes as thick as hers), and as her vision cleared, she was acutely aware of Thane leaning in close, his face inches away.

"_Siha_," he began with concern. "Are you going to be all right?"

She caught his gaze and hesitated. Thane, who had been with her through Pragia, through being called a 'mistake', through more gunfights than she could count with both hands. Who had helped her through her times of doubt, but had trusted her enough to let her see him during his, as well. Who shouldn't even _like_ her, by any sane reasoning, but who had persisted nonetheless, ever the perfect gentleman.

Her arm snaked around his shoulders, and a hand settled on the back of his head, pulling him close. His scales were cool under her fingertips, deceptively smooth-feeling despite their texture.

"Yeah," she whispered in the second before their lips met. "Right now, I'm rock fuckin' steady, Krios."

It was better than she could've imagined. He didn't resist this time, unlike back on Pragia, and Jack dove into the kiss with everything she had. She pressed against his mouth firmly, exploring; his lips were as smooth as his scales, but with a warmth that enticed her tongue between them with a gentle push. Their tongues met halfway, tips sliding over each other, and she could feel his running over her teeth with a vaguely playful affection. Pushing off the desk, Jack slid into the chair, straddling the drell's lap, and straightened up so she could get both arms around his neck. She tilted her head back down and resumed the kiss, running her tongue over his lips and sliding it back into his mouth with zeal.

She could feel his hands on the nearly-bare skin of her back, the cool sensation of his fingertips sliding over her shoulders and working their way down. It sent a delighted chill racing straight up her spine, and she broke off to 'mmm' delightedly into his mouth and punctuate it with a nip to his lower lip. She'd had a couple drell in her time, but she'd never kissed one (it had usually been either boredom or business), and Jack, in the midst of nibbling Thane's lip and jaw, decided she'd really been missing out.

"So," she breathed, her voice husky in his ear, "think your desk can support both of us?"

"I...no, not right now," he answered.

"...What, you're gonna reinforce it?" She snorted at the idea, and bit at his dewlap and the side of his neck lightly just to emphasize her amusement.

Thane shifted under her; his hand touched the bottom of her chin, tilting her head back to meet his eyes. "_Siha_," he said carefully, "now is not a good time for that."

The convict glared back. "The hell it's not," she insisted, and ground down just a little on his lap for good measure. It _definitely_ got a reaction; his eyes widened and she could practically feel his interest from the way his back arched. "Look, I want this. You want this. We're...fuck, I can't believe I'm saying this sentimental shit, but we're good for each other, Krios." She leaned forward, pressing her forehead against his so their eyes were barely an inch apart. "You can't deny that."

"And I won't," he agreed, one hand stroking over her scalp. The sensation drew another shiver and a throaty purr from Jack, who leaned into the motion just to encourage him a little. "But now, after what's happened today, is a bad time. You're upset from thinking about all this....you were about to cry just a moment ago."

"Fuck you, I don't cry," Jack grumbled, nonetheless pilfering a few more pecks on the lips.

"The point stands." He sounded vaguely amused at her defiance. "I'm emotional as well, _siha_...it's been a turbulent day for me, and although it's helped me grow surer of what I feel for you, neither of us are in a state where doing that would help."

She thought about this for a moment, staring into his deep black eyes. "You think maybe we'd regret it?"

Thane shrugged. "I don't imagine we'd _regret_ it...at least I wouldn't." That managed to draw a small grin from her, at least. "But it wouldn't be right, not when we're both like this. Give it some time, so that both of us have a while to cool off and consider how we feel, and then we can try."

Jack took a deep breath, and stroked at one of the fringes that lined Thane's cheek. As much as she hated to admit it, he was right: really, at the moment, both of them were emotional wrecks. It had been a hell of a week for the two of them, and maybe rushing into things wouldn't help as much as it would get them all tangled up.

With a sigh of defeat, she mustered up her impulse control, and nodded. "All right." Determined not to let him have the last word, she paused for another kiss, holding it for a good many seconds just to make her point before she pulled back and climbed off the assassin. "Let's chill, then. Go a few days and see if we're still interested once we get our heads unfucked."

A smile flickered at Thane's lips. "Thank you, Jack. We've come this far, and there's nobody else I'd have with me the rest of the way."

"Yeah...likewise." She made her way across the life support room, hitting the door controls, and paused at the exit to look back at him. "Night, Kr..." A somewhat awkward cough, then: "Night, Thane."

"Good night, _siha_," he returned, with a much more fully-formed smile.

As the door to life support slid closed behind her, Jack ambled out into the crew deck, heading for the elevator. She intended to head down to the cargo hold and...possibly relieve some tension (and then some; she could still feel the smooth caress of his lips on hers), but more importantly, think about what had transpired. It was...frustrating, to some degree, but on the other hand, she had something she wasn't at all used to: somebody who respected her. That was going to take some getting used to, although Jack was beginning to think maybe there was something to this whole---

Wait.

_What?_

"Okay, who the fuck painted the elevator _orange and green_? And when did it grow _arms_?!"

* * *

**A/N: **Remember, licking drell is only to be done under professional supervision. Lick responsibly.


	11. Chapter 11

Mass Effect is the property of Bioware.

**A/N: **Christ, that was a busy two weeks. So how was everybody's exam period? Mine kinda kicked my ass; I had to administer, score, and then upload _twelve_ of those lil' bastards. This was half done for almost a week and a half before I finally got around to finishing it.

Anyway, the side project I mentioned in the last chapter is up. The story is entitled Justicar Versus World. It's mostly for the Samara fans out there, although Morinth and Zaeed are also going to be factoring heavily into it.

* * *

**Eleven**

"...heart rate elevated, but blood pressure still average. Curious. Skin shows mild discolorment around lips; slight abrasive irritation also present."

Jack opened her eyes, dazed as hell and feeling a headache beginning somewhere between her temples. She blinked once, twice---and then ten times in two seconds as a blinding light abruptly blocked out her field of vision.

"Hmm. Pupils heavily dilated. Healthy response to light, however, and showing normal cognitive functioning---"

"Motherfucker!" She swatted at the light, knocking it away. "Get that thing out of my face!"

The painful brightness vanished, leaving the soothing glow of the medbay's overhead lights, and the disapproving face of Mordin Solus replaced it. The salarian's upside-down visage frowned at her. "Recommend caution. Sensitive medical equipment. Could have been laser scalpel, for all you knew."

"Then you wouldn't have been shining it in my eyes," Jack growled, sitting up with considerable effort. "The hell happened? Last thing I know the elevator was attacking me, and then I'm back over here."

A quick glance around revealed that she had been taken to the medbay, where she currently occupied one of the cots used to hold any patients undergoing treatment. Mordin exchanged a glance with Doctor Chakwas, who was on Jack's other side looking over several scanner readings, and apparently decided honesty was the best policy: "Hallucination. Elevator same as always; serotonin levels in your bloodstream suggest that you were drugged. Found you shouting about malevolent doors on crew deck; had to recruit Grunt and Samara to help subdue you and get you here."

"I understand it's a common lifestyle out in the Terminus systems," Chakwas began with caution, "but we decided not to assume anything until we could ask you: have you been using any drugs over the past twenty-four hours?"

"Nah." Jack shook her head and added a shrug for good measure. "Got some hallex down in the hold, but I'm saving it for a 'special occasion'. Why? You think I was dusting?"

Mordin clicked his tongue disapprovingly. "Vitals not consistent with red sand use. Hallucinogens present, apparently absorbed orally. Naturally-occurring chemical compound indicates biological origin rather than manufacture, specifically drell salival excretions. Implications," and here he paused for a breath, "_intriguing_."

Doctor Chakwas saw what was coming well enough to know that she should duck behind the EKG unit.

* * *

"I got a couple breeding requests after my ritual was done," Grunt said, "but Okeer didn't put any imprints about krogan mating practices in the tank." The hint of pride in his voice trailed away into uncertainty. "I'm not sure I'd know what to do. Guess I could just improvise, but I don't want the female camp thinking I'm some kind of naïve whelp."

Shepard scratched the back of his head and stared at the ground. This had to be the most awkward conversation he'd had all week. "Look, Grunt," he began, "I'm probably not the best person to talk to about this. Maybe when the mission's over I can have Wrex talk to you about---"

The shriek of horror from the medbay was loud, piercing, and unmistakably Jack's. The krogan and his battlemaster both turned in its general direction, looking somewhat nonplussed.

"...You think something's wrong?" Shepard asked, concern appearing in his eyes.

"Don't know," Grunt said sagely. "Don't think I wanna know, either."

* * *

"The _entire ship_ knows?!" Jack shouted, with an examination table hovering over her head and primed to launch at the salarian doctor. "You went and fuckin' _told_ them?!"

"Nothing of the sort!" Mordin insisted, speaking extremely fast even for him. "Doctor-patient confidentiality a sacred trust! Would never reveal personal data without health information release forms signed in triplicate. Merely explained, when Commander Shepard and Yeoman Chambers came by, that hallucinogen was at work, nonlethal, probably biologically-derived. Under no circumstances suggested your romantic engagement with Mr. Krios was to blame."

Talking to Mordin was not unlike receiving FTL burst transmissions: it was a second after you received the message that your mind properly processed it. By the time the end of his explanation hit, Jack's glare became (if it were at all possible) even more venomous. "You told _Chambers_?!"

"Well, yes. Was addressing both her and the commander at the time. Saw no reason to restrict information access."

Jack gave an exasperated sigh. "Solus, if Chambers knows, then yeah, the entire ship knows."

"Hrm." The salarian tapped all three fingers against his chin. "Likely should have considered that." He immediately brightened again, after having remained somber for all of two and a half seconds. "But silver lining to rain! Or cloud, forget exact aphorism; doesn't matter. Field of human-drell relations scientifically untapped! Full of potential data to gather. Could run experiments, create instructional videos---dare to suggest? _Documentary_."

He ducked just in time to dodge the examination table as it flew over his head and crashed against the wall. STG-honed reflexes: the gift that kept on giving.

"All right," growled Jack, stalking towards her prey with a suddenly-dead-serious gleam in her eyes and a familiar blue glow emanating from one fist. "You've got about five seconds to rephrase that thought before I smear your scrawny frog ass all over the medbay."

Mordin scurried behind an x-ray machine. "All right, documentary a negative. But think of potential benefits!" he reasoned, rather frantically. "Nothing wrong with relieving stress, but many things that could go wrong: health risks, embarrassing misunderstandings, all avoidable with advice on interspecies relations." He held up a finger. "Consider: could have avoided spectacle in front of elevator with prior knowledge about drell oral contact. Not interested in repeat performance, hmm?"

It took a moment of careful consideration for the biotic to settle down from 'homicidal urging' into 'thoroughly pissed off', and even then she still kept a fist clenched, just in case the need to deck the salarian unexpectedly presented itself.

"All right." She took a deliberate step forward, at which point Mordin warily took another one back. "What'd you have in mind?"

"Ah!" he exclaimed, eyes brightening with renewed enthusiasm. "Have a wide range of...performance aids on hand for your perusal. Lubricants with corticosteroids; should help with rashes from prolonged skin contact. Instructional videos, positions comfortable for both species, anatomical diagrams—good news (for you at least), natural ribbed pattern present in drell males."

Jack coughed. "Yeah. Had a drell once; I know about the ribbing." It'd been quick and impersonal, and she hadn't exactly had time to enjoy it, so noting the, uh, distinctive advantages of drell genitalia were more of a detached, clinical interest than anything else. Sex usually didn't mean much out in the Terminus; half the time it was a bargaining chip, and the other half it was a weapon. Jack didn't derive much enjoyment from the act after a decade or so of using it strategically...it was strange to be looking forward to it with somebody who wasn't explicitly going to be doing something for her in exchange.

"Excellent. No need for refresher course, then. Er, about hallucinations—no actual treatment at present, apart from detox. Immunity to drell toxins possible, but requires buildup: progressive ingestion of small doses over period of time. Personally, would recommend..." Mordin paused for a breath. "...practice."

"Heh." A lascivious grin spread across Jack's face. "I like how you think, Solus."

The salarian brought up his omnitool. "Will have some supplies discreetly delivered to the hold for you," he assured her, barely audible over the machine-gun tapping of buttons. "Suggest usage of the lotion during (ahem) _practice_ so as to avoid skin irritation. Any problems, message lab; will come running."

Feeling slightly sheepish, the convict picked up the examination table she had launched at Mordin and moved it back across the room with her biotics. It settled back into its normal spot, only slightly the worse for wear, and Jack moved for the door. "Thanks, Doc. Uh...my bad with the table there."

"No problem at all!" he called after her retreating form. "Much rather equipment damaged than skull. Matter of personal priorities, really."

"I'm in total agreement," came Chakwas' voice from behind the EKG.

* * *

**One Week Later**

"All right, ante up, motherfuckers."

Chief Engineer Donnelly scoffed. "C'mon now, Jack. Give us all another minute to consider our options here. You can't rush this kind of thing."

"Like hell I can't," Jack retorted. She had a full house at the moment and, barring some extraordinary cheating on Donnelly's part, was going to sweep the hell out of this round. "You've been trying to figure out what to switch for the last four minutes, and it's gonna start pissing me off if I have to wait much longer."

In the absence of anything better to do, half the crew (Thane included, to Jack's dismay) was up on the command deck, watching as Shepard, Tali, and EDI alternately messed with a piece of Reaper technology they had recently acquired. Attempts to integrate the IFF unit into the Normandy's systems had been rocky at first, but with a bit of trial and error, the team had begun to make progress. Despite Tali's jubilation, however, it was not a remotely interesting process to watch, especially if you estimated warp drive modifications to be just below grass growing on the 'interesting things' scale, which Jack did. And so, here she was down in the engine room, having dragged a table in so they could play some four-way Skyllian Five.

"Look, Skyllian's like a science, y'know." Donnelly raised his eyebrows as he replaced a couple cards, trying (with arguable degrees of success) to look as sagely as possible. "You're not supposed to blitzkrieg it, you have to be methodical or else you throw the entire game off."

"All I'm hearing are excuses for why she's kicking your ass at your own game," offered Engineer Daniels, who had wisely folded at the first sight of the psychotic grin on Jack's face. Her nails drummed against the table impatiently. "Come on, Ken, it's not the Battle of the Citadel. You can afford to lose once in a while."

Her counterpart looked aggrieved. "It's not just her stomping us, either," he said with a solemnity normally reserved for natural disasters and captured garrisons. "Dunno which of you invited our fourth wheel here, but you _really_ could've made a better choice, because he bluffs better than anybody I've played against, that's for damned sure."

All three sets of eyes glanced across the table at the aforementioned fourth player, who peered back impassively with a twitch of its browplates. "Geth do not bluff. Simple probability determination defeats attempts at subterfuge in an environment where all factors are known to be accounted for."

Jack rolled her eyes. To be fair, the squad was just bizarre enough that when Shepard had brought back an active geth along with the IFF unit, she hadn't really batted an eye at the idea of bringing it along to fight the Collectors. Still, Legion (creepy name, too. Did geth even have names?) was anything but acclimated to living alongside organics, and trying to communicate it was frustrating enough that Jack didn't bother.

Donnelly, on the other hand, was game for a try at it. "If geth don't bluff," he said slyly, leaning forward in an attempt to stare down Legion's flashlight-eye, "then you have to tell the truth, right? So if I asked, you'd have to tell us what kind of hand you drew."

There was a pause as Legion glanced down at its cards. It was a long way to glance, seeing as how the geth refused to use a chair and was currently standing. Finally: "...No data available." (Jack could swear she heard a hint of _smugness_, of all the things, in its voice.)

"Is it mocking me?" he sputtered, slumping back in his chair. "Gabby, it's mocking me. The _machine_ is _mocking_ me."

"He's not the only one," Daniels demurred.

The door to the engine room slid open, and Thane strode in, apparently fresh from the command deck. He took in the card game with a glance, and an amused smile crossed his face as he strode over to the table. "Good news. The new IFF unit is finished with installation, and EDI says it should be ready for a test run within two days." The convict could feel his hand on her shoulder, steady and gentle (and imperceptible enough that neither of the engineers spotted it. To be fair, if they had, they would've had the good sense to not tease _Jack_, of all people).

"Oh, that's a relief." Donnelly dropped his cards on the table and hastily rose, hurrying over to a console. "Let me check and see if there's any fluctuation in the power grid. We don't know how much of a drain that thing'll be on our systems. Gabby, take a look at the readings from the cannons while I look over the engines; we might need Garrus to do some calibrations."

As the petite engineer complied (though not without a fleeting, wistful glance at the pile of credits on the table), Jack glanced at Legion. "Looks like it's just you and me."

"We have reached a strategic impasse."

"Yup, and I'm not risking trying to out-poker-face a machine, so here." She pushed half the credits across the table at Legion, and began shoveling the other half into her pouch. "See, everybody wins."

The geth watched her actions from across the table, and warbled briefly to itself in FTL-speak. "Error," it hesitantly stated. "Jack-platform. Your current strategy is in violation of the protocols established for Skyllian Five: cessation of play is only to occur when all participants have—"

Jack broke in before it could finish its spiel. "Yeah? Stick with us long enough and you'll figure things out eventually, tin man. The only reason to know the rules is so you can break them."

After a moment of consensus-building, Legion's browplates flicked upwards in acknowledgement. "We will store this data for future reference on social construction of 'rules'."

"See?" She flashed the geth a lopsided grin. "Learning already."

Thane's hand wandered up her neck, and she could feel the backs of his fingers brushing over a cheek. Jack leaned into his touch, enjoying the sensation of smooth scales over such a sensitive area. It was weird as hell being _caressed_; she hadn't been involved in any of that for as long as she could remember. Considering most of the 'relationships' ('arrangements', perhaps, would be a better word) she'd been in prior to this, Thane was wildly unfamiliar territory. For starters, as he'd demonstrated twice now, he wasn't interested in rushing things, and after the month they'd spent together, Jack was finally ready to admit that maybe it really _was_ because he respected her enough not to move too fast, and not just because he was trying to get out of owing her any favors. On top of that, he was a romantic, and delightfully subtle---which her past flings had been anything but. This entire experience was a bit of an adventure, and for someone like Jack, who didn't really have a comfort zone to speak of, finding an adventure was a rare treat these days.

She intended to savor that treat for all it was worth, because with every day it passed, it looked to be heading in directions she was beginning to like.

"I didn't come down here just to provide that update, unfortunately."

"Knew there had to be a catch." Jack sighed and leaned her head back against the drell's chest, catching his upside-down gaze. "What's up?"

He chuckled slightly; the act sent little vibrations from his chest through her shaved scalp. A bizarre sensation, to say the least, but not altogether unpleasant. "We've got a rescue operation for the Flotilla, apparently. Shepard wants the whole team helping out on this one; it'll be easier if we have multiple search parties."

"And you think I'm gonna do what Shepard's ordering me to, just because you'll be there?" she asked with a smirk beginning to form.

"Yes."

A beat went by in silence, and then she smirked and swatted Thane with the back of a hand. "...You didn't have to answer so _fast_, fucker."

"He who hesitates is lost," the assassin replied with mock solemnity.

"Minimal response time is indicative of superior processing power," interrupted Legion, who had been studiously observing the entire exchange. "We were under the impression that organics place a high value on this feature."

"You're coming too, Legion," said Thane. "The commander wants you helping with one of the search parties, apparently."

"Hopefully I'll be helping to sweep-and-clear for the search parties," Jack mused out loud. "Shepard's not gonna be dumb enough to have me turning over rocks or some shit; he knows I need action."

Thane shifted uncomfortably.

"...I'm not gonna like what you say next, am I?"

* * *

As both search parties set off and tromped into the bushes of Gei Hinnom, Jack stood in the shade of the Kodiak's bay doors and raised a double-finger salute at the rest of the team.

"_Guard duty_?!?" she shouted after both groups. "The hell with all of you assholes!"

Thane, seated on the shuttle's loading ramp, looked alternately bemused and mortified at Jack's behavior. "Jack, I'm certain Commander Shepard had a reason for assigning you to help guard the shuttle," he explained patiently. "You will get a chance to mount an assault soon enough, if the progress with the IFF is any indicator."

"They're gonna be out there for hours, Thane." Jack growled under her breath, shotgun secured and both arms folded over her chest. "They might not even find that quarian, and we're gonna be here for the rest of the day. Doing nothing. _Bored_."

"We'll have to be patient," the assassin said. "Judging from all the life signs that we picked up on entry, there's probably hostile wildlife, at the least. It would be best if we stayed alert; there's no telling what's out there, and the shuttle could be endangered if a klixen, or something similar, tries to get into it."

It bears mentioning that the two of them were not alone on guard duty. Jacob Taylor, the Normandy's unofficial security chief and quartermaster, was the third squad member who had been assigned to watch the Kodiak, and up until that point in the conversation he had been securing several cargo crates in the shuttle's rear bay. Apparently satisfied with whatever he was checking on, he ambled around to the occupied side of the shuttle and took up a position next to Jack and Thane (wisely keeping the latter between him and the former). "It's not so bad," he stated. "They'll probably find the quarian within the next hour or two and we'll be good to go. Hopefully she's all right."

Jack turned a hostile gaze on the Cerberus operative, her lip curling somewhere between a sneer and a snarl. "Real heartwarming, Taylor. That insignia on your armor kinda kills any impression that you give a shit about the quarian, so stop talking to us like we're retarded."

Most people, at this point, would have taken the bait and given her an excuse to flatten them, but Jacob stayed chill under fire, to her surprise; the only hint that she'd agitated him was a slight narrowing of his eyes. "Look," he began, "You of all people have plenty of reasons to distrust Cerberus. In fact, so do I—I don't agree with everything they've done either. But they're the only ones trying to stop the Collectors, and if that means I have to throw in with Cerberus to do it, I will." His shotgun had slipped around to his chest on its strap, and he pushed it back behind one arm. "It doesn't mean I support terrorism, and it definitely doesn't mean I hate aliens like one of those Terra Firma jackasses."

"He has a point, _siha_," Thane interjected, looking up at Jack. "Subscribing to a concept---'the Collectors are a threat', in this case---doesn't necessarily mean you have to subscribe to that concept's ideology, or to the extremes that might come from that ideology." The 'et tu, brute' glare that he immediately received from the biotic certainly didn't improve his hopes for the situation to be resolved peacefully.

It went much better than expected, though: after a second of giving both of them a rather murderous look, Jack muttered something along the lines of 'shit, you don't even know who you are' and stormed off towards the bushes, presumably to sulk or shoot something (or possibly both). The drell listened as her footsteps receded into the distance and eventually fell silent, then gave a long, drawn-out sigh.

Jacob, a bit nonplussed at the treatment he'd just received, backed up against the shuttle's side and took a seat. The two watched clouds gather on the Gei Hinnom horizon for a few minutes before Jacob spoke up. "Thanks for sticking up for me there."

"She can be an all-or-nothing kind of person at times," Thane said. "I find her passion endearing, but often it can make her unreasonable and unwilling to empathize with anyone she views as being 'against her'."

The operative chuckled. "I'm guessing that group's kind of overpopulated by now."

Contemplating this, Thane leaned back and relaxed a bit against the shuttle's armored side. His dark eyes swept the forest's edges, searching for any sign of movement. After a quick twice-over (he had learned a long time ago that in his line of work, you never did just a once-over when searching for something), he responded, "I can't say as I blame her. If I had the kind of life she's lived from Pragia to here, I think I'd be inclined toward a somewhat less..._charitable_ outlook on other people."

"I guess my boss helped out with that a bit," Jacob agreed. His lips pursed with distaste. "Some days I think about how Cerberus were the only ones willing to do anything about the Collectors and the Reapers, and I know I did the right thing joining up with them. But then I see the crap they've got going on behind my back, and...and well, I wonder. Doubt, y'know?" Despite his discomfort, he seemed to relax as he talked, as if relieved to be getting this off his chest. "Ah, hell, Jack was right. Guess I really don't know who I am, do I?"

Thane quirked a browridge upwards. "That's not necessarily the case. If you didn't doubt that you had done the right thing when you learned about their actions, and simply turned a blind eye to the less savory side of Cerberus, then you would have a problem. Wondering about it, though, shows that you still have principles, and you're measuring the utility of helping the galaxy with possibly compromising those principles. That's anything but indecisive, and it shows who you are, perhaps, better than you think it does."

"Maybe." Seeing a rustling movement in the bushes, Jacob sat up slightly and leveled his shotgun at it; after a moment, the noise died down into the distance, and he relaxed again. "Doubt isn't exactly something we were trained to acknowledge, of course, but I see your point."

"It's not unhealthy in moderation. Doubt is uncomfortable," Thane quoted, "but certainty is ridiculous. Voltaire. Jack is wrong about you, Mr. Taylor, and I'm willing to acknowledge that even if she isn't."

A minute of silent contemplation went by, and the assassin listened to the wind whipping through the treetops. One thing that was universal, regardless of what world you were on: to the untrained, that sound always evoked images of stalking animals, howling for one's blood in the distance. Thane recalled his first few days of wilderness survival training; it was the most horrifying sound a nine-year-old drell could imagine. How strange it was to look back on those days and think of how young and idealistic he'd been. True, there was still plenty of good in the galaxy, but time had shown him the darkness between the stars, and once a young mind was disabused of some notions there was no going back to them.

Having spent a few moments shifting uncomfortably, Jacob pulled himself to his feet and rested his shotgun over a shoulder. "Thanks," he finally said. "And for what it's worth...I was wrong about you, too. When Shepard brought you on the Normandy, I thought you were just a contract killer, loyal to the money you were getting more than the mission itself, and that you'd turn on us if you got a good enough offer. I've had bad experiences with mercenary types in the past, and...well, I let that color my opinion of you." He scratched at the back of his head, brushing away sweat from the blazing Gei Hinnom sun. "But you're not like that. Hell, Shepard's not even paying you, and you've proved your loyalty to this crew ten times over. So basically, I guess what I'm saying is I'm glad to have you with us, Krios, and I wish I'd been more receptive at first."

"No offense taken, Mr. Taylor." Thane nodded politely at the operative. "That took some nerve to say, and I salute you for it. Likewise, it's good to have you on my side, particularly with the mission ahead of us---"

He trailed off into silence as Jack reappeared from the woods, looking slightly less sullen and with her shotgun holstered. Perhaps the walk had done her a bit of good; from her body language, it seemed she was uncertain and had likely been doing some thinking about the conversation. Thane watched as she wordlessly returned to her spot next to the two of them and sat back down, cautiously leaning against his side. He accepted the gesture, and put an arm around the small of her back.

"...All right," she began, with deliberate care. "Maybe you do give a shit about the quarian."

To his credit, Jacob accepted the not-quite-admission with grace. "Not just the quarian," he responded. "Hearing about things like Akuze, Kahoku, the attack on the Flotilla...hell, what they did to you? That shit was _wrong_, plain and simple. No way to rationalize that kind of behavior, and I don't see why Miranda didn't just admit it when you asked her."

Thane suspected it was the way Jack had asked, but there wasn't really any need to bring that up at the moment.

"...Heh." The convict shifted in place against Thane's side. "You're not so bad, Taylor."

Jacob grinned. "Yeah, likewise."

Thane leaned over surreptitiously. "That's as much of an apology as you're going to get from her," he offered, drawing a chuckle from the other man.

"Bite me, Krios," Jack growled, though she didn't bother to lift her head from his shoulder.

After that, guard duty went by fairly easily. Nearly an hour passed in amicable silence, and although Jack nudged him playfully once or twice, she seemed to have settled down nicely, so Thane was able to relax a little. After a while, he got up to stretch his legs, and grabbed a ration canister of water from inside the shuttle. The icy water was ambrosia to his throat on a day this hot; although drell preferred warm, dry environments, that didn't mean they couldn't get parched from the heat. He returned to his spot between Jack and Jacob, and took another much-needed swig from the canister as he sat back down.

"So about the cheerleader," Jack was saying when he returned.

"Who, Miranda? Yeah, I noticed you two didn't exactly get on that well." Jacob shrugged. "Better to keep you apart, so as to avoid---"

"Ever fucked her?"

Thane choked on his drink.

There was a brief period of panic while Thane coughed and Jacob stammered for an answer. Jack helpfully contributed by pounding the drell on the back until he got the water out of his trachea, by which time Jacob had thankfully come up with an answer: "No! It wasn't...no. There was nothing like that." He'd darkened slightly with sheepishness. "I mean, we had drinks once or twice, but no, that was as far as it went. I don't think things would've worked out."

"Too bad," the convict answered, leaning back on Thane now that he'd stopped coughing. "She kinda _needs_ it. Hard and repeatedly."

Jacob bit back a laugh, looking away so the two of them wouldn't see him trying to hold it in. "Uh...I'll pass that along to the Illusive Man's recommendation box."

"Don't pussy around it, Taylor." Jack folded her arms and gave him a grave 'this is all up to you' stare. "Go in there and rail her. Maybe she won't be such an insufferable bitch afterwards."

"I dunno, it's...well. She's the XO--"

"Mr. Vakarian is the XO," Thane corrected. "Anyone who thinks otherwise is...well, Ms. Lawson."

"--and I'm one of the grunts, even if we're friends," Jacob continued determinedly. "Cerberus isn't so bad with the chain of command regs, but still, sneaking into the XO's quarters..."

Thane nodded solemnly. "A heavy risk."

"But the _prize_," Jack insisted. "Think about it: you get some, and the rest of the ship doesn't have to put up with her bullshit, if you perform up to par---"

The commlink inside the shuttle buzzed just then. Jacob, clearly thankful for the opportunity to get out of this conversation, nearly vaulted into the Kodiak, moving his way towards the front to answer it. Jack could distantly hear snatches of the conversation through the door, particularly an exclamation of 'What?!', but didn't have more than a moment to wonder what the message was about before Jacob came bounding back out, wide-eyed and breathless.

"That was Joker," he exclaimed. "We've gotta get Shepard on the line."

The seriousness that was suddenly present in Jacob's voice made Thane stand as well, suddenly alert. He could feel Jack pulling herself upright using his arm and paused to help her up. "What's going on? Is everything all right?"

The other man was already dialing in a frequency on his personal comm. "No...no, it's not. The Collectors just hit the Normandy while we were down here."

Thane's eyes widened. He felt a surge of worry rush through his chest, and didn't doubt that his expression matched Jacob's now. Next to him, even Jack looked alarmed, with her mouth uncharacteristically agape.

"Is everyone all right?" he asked, but apparently Jacob had reached Shepard's team, because he was already speaking into the comm.

"Shepard? Taylor here. You've gotta bring the quarian back to the shuttle; Joker says the Collectors boarded the Normandy."

He paused, gritting his teeth at whatever question he heard, and then answered:

"No sir, Commander. He said...he said they took our entire crew."


	12. Chapter 12

Mass Effect is the creative property of Bioware.

**A/N:** Well, good news everyone. I passed my thesis defense, and now I'm an MA. :D Thank you all for your patience while I got through the craziest month ever. I've got a big cross-country move coming next month, so I aim to finish up with this before then. Thanks for staying with me.

* * *

**Twelve**

The die had been cast. Tonight, they would pass through the Omega-4 Relay and, if fate allowed it, take the fight to the Collectors.

Although Shepard's focus on preparation had served them well so far, the abduction of the Normandy's crew had forced his hand. He had made it crystal clear, during the emergency meeting convened as soon as they returned to the ship, that the safety of their crew was his number one priority, and that the ship would be hitting the relay as soon as possible to chase the Collectors. Miranda had been the sole voice of dissent on the issue: although her labeling of the crew as 'acceptable losses' was technically correct in the scheme of things, the Commander had never been one to view anyone as expendable, regardless of circumstances. So it was that they were on the way to the Omega Nebula, ready to pass through the fateful relay and embark on a mission that would almost definitely result in the death of everyone on board.

As it happened, that morning was a Wednesday, and Thane found himself once again in the observation deck, sharing an hour with Samara.

Fifty-five minutes had passed in total silence. The justicar had not so much as looked at the cup of coffee he'd poured for her...or at him, for that matter. The entire time, she had remained on the other side of the observation deck, staring out the window at the darkness between the stars. As far as Thane could recall, she had not so much as stirred. He didn't mind (it would not be the first time they had spent the hour without saying anything to each other), but in light of recent circumstances he found himself wondering if it was best for things to continue this way.

Kelly Chambers, who would _not stop coming around_, despite his repeated protestations that he was already in a relationship and not interested in 'broadening her horizons' (Thane felt a twinge of guilt at that thought; the yeoman had been taken with the rest of the crew, and it felt wrong to think ill of her now), had privately expressed to him her impression that Samara had been deeply depressed since the loss of her daughter. Although he did not have all the details on the incident, Thane was aware that the daughter in question had been a dangerous criminal, whom Samara had been obliged to execute under the Justicar Code. It was...uncomfortably close to his situation with Kolyat: fraught with the risk of being responsible for the progeny's downfall. He knew from experience that regardless of what Kolyat had done, he would still have thrown himself into whatever danger was necessary to rescue his son, and, Kalihira forbid, _killing_ him wasn't something Thane was sure he would have been able to do. He could only imagine the toll that the act must have taken on the justicar.

One who was less familiar with Samara, who had not spent the time with her that he had, would have likely wondered if it was possible for her to love _anything_ other than the Code; certainly, that would be an easy mistake to make, given her ruthless devotion to the justicar ideals. Thane, however, was in the unique position of being one of the few parents in the squad. He was familiar with the irrational devotion that parenthood could extract from even the coldest professionals. Even as attached to her job as Samara was...well, he had been too, in a sense, and although (to his shame) providing for his family had also resulted in their neglect, his obsessive working habits had never diminished his affection for his son.

Slowly, Thane rose from his chair. The chronometer read that two minutes were remaining; soon, he'd need to go prepare his gear for the jump to FTL that night. He crossed the room with tentative steps and, when he had closed the distance between himself and Samara, laid a cautious hand on the asari's shoulder. She did not resist, which he counted as a good sign.

"Did you want to talk?" he asked, choosing his words carefully. "I was..." A pause. Samara would probably be insulted by 'worried about you', so he tried a different tack. "I was concerned that perhaps no one had taken the time to speak with you, considering all the chaos."

She turned at last to look at him, and he began to think Chambers had been right. Although the tired smile Samara gave him was encouraging, it did not extend as far as her pale blue eyes. They were as cold and unyielding as they had always been, but there was something new in them: weariness, by the looks of it, and perhaps a bit of resignation as well.

"...Thane." Her voice matched her eyes, quite frankly, and it was fairly obvious that she saw right through the front, but Samara had the grace to not be offended by his worry, and her tone was both understanding and grateful. "Thank you," she began, "but my refuge is in the Code. I have stayed true to it for centuries now, and I know to fall back on it in times like these. Rest assured, I appreciate your concern...but I will endure."

Thane withdrew his hand. The words were heartening, but if her expression was any indicator... "Samara," he tried again, "this isn't healthy. I know it's hard to rely on oth-"

The ship's chronometers, including the one in the observation deck, buzzed quietly. Their hour was up. Thane sighed with frustration. He should have tried to talk to her sooner; she had to know that there were still things he needed to do, and she'd be well within her rights to kick him out and stay here, her guilt eating away at her from the inside.

Sure enough, after a few seconds, Samara turned back to the viewport. Her next words, despite being more or less what he'd predicted, did manage to startle him a bit: "Go to her, Thane. We have very little time remaining, and I think it would be best if you spent it together."

He hesitated for a moment, but complied after a second, turning. Considering the way this mission was likely to go, he _would_ like to spend the last few hours with Jack. They hadn't gotten much of a chance to be alone over the past few days, particularly lately.

So be it, then. He strode forward, reluctant to leave Samara to her grief, but not willing to disrespect her wishes, and made it halfway across the observation deck before he paused, and glanced back at her form illuminated against the blackness of space.

"We _will_ be coming back from this," he said. "I have faith in Shepard, in the rest of the team, and in you."

Without waiting for an answer, Thane stepped through the door into the crew deck and headed for the elevator. He had the feeling Jack would like to hear him repeat that...and on some level, he would too.

* * *

She was pacing like a caged animal when he got down to the cargo hold, all full of nervous energy and rearing to go. Thane took care to make some noise coming down the steps, so that he wouldn't sneak up on her (it might well result in a biotic attack if he surprised her handily enough). It felt awkward, almost forced, stepping so hard that his boots thudded even lightly against the stairs, but the gesture was an important one, for the aforementioned safety reasons.

Jack turned, startled, and he became quickly aware that something was amiss: the leather vest she'd purchased on the Citadel a week ago, which she had more or less constantly worn ever since, had been carefully folded and laid on the desk next to her guns. The straps securing her breasts and the vast range of tattoos that covered her body were back on full display, just as they'd been the day he met her. Thane cocked his head to the side, taking the sight in. It was vaguely primal, as if Jack were reverting to a state that felt more natural or comfortable for her, and it said a lot about the stress she was probably under if she felt the need to do so. Her eyeliner was streaked slightly across the tops of her cheeks-had she been crying? No reason to ask; it would probably only set her more on edge.

"Couldn't relax," she began, chewing hard on her bottom lip. "I thought I'd sleep in, since we've got a hell of a night coming up, but...god, look at me. I'm acting like Grunt."

He moved closer to put an arm around her. "There's no need to be concerned about the battle. I don't think I've ever seen anyone as qualified to make it through tonight as you are."

"It's not that." To his surprise, Jack broke away, pacing away towards her cot. "Look, I signed onto this knowing full well what could happen to me. Not like I had anything to lose, right?" The crunch of joints echoed loudly over the hold, and it took Thane a second to realize she was cracking her knuckles. "But...fuck, this kinda thing is hard to talk about. How're you so damn eloquent about it?"

"I'm not sure I follow," Thane answered, a browridge lifting slightly.

If anything, that only frustrated her more. The convict whirled in place with a growl and jabbed an accusatory finger towards him. "Don't be obtuse, Thane. It's like..." She sighed again. "People have this habit of dying on me, it comes with the job. I got used to it after a while, and I learned not to count on them being around for long. Makes it easier when they go. But with you, it's..." After a labored pause, Jack plopped back down on the cot and bit hard into one knuckle. Her sentence trailed off into a grudging silence.

He blinked as the pieces fell into place. She wasn't scared about the possibility of dying on the upcoming mission—that was ridiculous. She was afraid of the possibility of _him_ dying. Perhaps not necessarily in the Collectors' base, but even if they survived that, he had less than half a year left to live. Jack had as much as admitted that she didn't take loss well just now; perhaps she'd had a particularly bad experience in the past (or a bad experience at all—she didn't seem like the type who would be willing to try something a second time if she'd gotten burned initially) and was afraid he'd go the same way.

Thane wanted to tell her it would be all right, of course, but what could he _say_? It didn't matter what kind of reassurance he gave...she was right. He'd be dead in a matter of months, and no amount of wishing would change that.

An acute pang of fresh, stinging guilt stabbed through his chest.

"_Siha_," he began, crossing tentatively to sit next to her, "I have known for many years that I will die." He reached out a cautious arm and slid it around the small of her back. "Over time, I came to-"

To his surprise, Jack cut him off. "Don't give me that 'accept it' bullshit," she snapped, turning to glare. Her eyes, already heavy and expressive thanks to her thick set of eyelashes, narrowed menacingly. "You've made it clear you're fine with this, but what about me, for fuck's sake? I'm not used to losing...well, people like you; there haven't exactly been many of them." After a second, her expression softened, just a hair. "By all rights, you shouldn't have been one, either, but...you were _there_, you helped me, and I just kind of...rgh. Hell, I'm not even totally sure _what_ to call whatever I've been feeling for you, but I know this: thinking about that expiration date of yours _hurts_."

A moment passed by in silence. Thane wasn't sure what to say, really, and found himself studying the cargo hold's deckplates as he searched uncomfortably for words. His arm tightened around her almost imperceptibly, but as he remained silent, Jack sighed and pulled away from him, turning to lie back on the cot.

"...Was this a mistake?" she finally asked. "As in should we have stayed...well, not _enemies_, but...whatever we were? I mean...you were there for me, and I had the chance to keep it as...whatever it was. Friends."

"I think it was 'Friends?', actually," Thane appended with a small, tentative smile and a pat to Jack's thigh.

"Heh. Yeah." Her long lashes blinked furiously, scattering the gathering hints of tears in Jack's eyes. "I know I got myself into this, but..._fuck_. That doesn't make it any easier. Throw me a line here, Thane, c'mon. Can you see where I'm coming from here, at least? Did I just set myself up to get fucked over again?"

The drell bit his lip, considering her words, and finally turned to look across the cot into her eyes. "Jack," he began, "I don't think this is a mistake. I realize-" and here he held up a hand to preemptively catch any arguments, "-that you're in a better position than I am to look at the long-term repercussions of this. But even if you aren't sure how you feel about me, know this: I care about you, and I _am_ sure of it. I don't regret a second of the time we've shared so far."

She stared back at him, sullen, eyeliner streaking on her cheeks.

"Despite all my experience," Thane continued, gently running a hand over the leg nearest him, "I must confess I've spent more than a few nights wide awake, asking myself the same questions you've just voiced. Not simply because I didn't want to inflict that on you, but..." His gaze lowered, and a long, hesitant moment passed. Despite himself, he could feel his hand tremble against her knee. "...this is shameful. I accepted my body's death long ago—I should be at peace on the eve of battle, and yet with you by my side, when I dwell on our eventual parting, a sense of dread, hollow and numbing, bores its way into my heart." Teeth ground together roughly as his jaw clenched. "I should be above this, _siha_. I'm ashamed."

He could hear her sitting up next to him, and a second later, her hand brushed past his neck and pulled him closer. Jack's forehead rested lightly against his shoulder as she leaned forward, so that when a dry, humorless chuckle (more like a sob, really) escaped her, he felt the vibrations running all the way down to his fingertips.

"Guess the icy badass assassin's not so above it after all," the convict murmured, both arms tightening around him. A frustrated sigh escaped her lips, and he could feel the hot wave of her breath running down his arm. "It's not fair, Thane. It's _not fucking fair._"

Thane reached over to stroke at her cheek. "The galaxy rarely is, _siha_. You and I know that better than most, I think." The hand at Jack's face pushed lightly, tilting her head back, and he leaned closer to press a kiss against her lips. They held it for a brief, hungry moment until she pulled back, placing an arm between them.

"So what, then?" Her tone was steady, but resigned, weary. "Is this it?"

Swallowing his inhibitions, he took the plunge. "I don't want it to be. I treasure what we have, _siha_, and I don't want to let the fact that it will end someday tarnish what it is to us, here and now." Jack had leaned in again to peer into his eyes; her expression was unreadable, but at least she was listening. "It will never last as long as either of us would prefer, but I think what time we have should be treated as a gift, and we should enjoy it to the fullest while it's still here."

He paused to give her a chance to respond, but she stayed silent, pensive, holding his gaze without another word. Truthfully, he couldn't tell what Jack was thinking at the moment, and he couldn't blame her; it wasn't an easy decision for anyone to make, let alone people like them.

After a second, Thane gently released her and pulled himself to his feet. "I'd like you to think about it," he said, stroking her shoulder affectionately. "I know it's difficult, but I think letting eventualities destroy what we've shared would be a greater regret for both of us than reaching out and taking hold of life while we can." The drell turned, straightening his collar, and took a step forward. "Perhaps after the mission, we can bring it up again and try to come to a decision when-"

Jack's hand reached out and settled on his hip, stopping him in his tracks. He turned back around, blinking, as she pulled him back to the cot. The hand trailed upwards, reaching his jaw, and gently tilted his head forward, leaving him to look down at her.

Their eyes met.

"Stay with me," she whispered.

He couldn't help the relieved sigh that ran through his chest at that moment, the tangible sense of release as his shoulders relaxed again. "_Siha_," he answered, lowering himself onto the cot next to her, "it would be my privilege."

They passed the next few hours in each other's arms, nestled together comfortably in the darkness of the cargo hold and silent except for the slow, reassuring steadiness of their breathing, and for those few hours, everything in the galaxy was as it should be.

* * *

By the time Jack and Thane answered the call to the briefing room, the rest of the squad had already gathered, and Shepard was pointing to a holographic layout of what had to be the Collector base they'd crashed on. "We don't have much time to formulate a plan of attack here," he warned. "Unless we strike first, it won't be more than an hour until the Collectors send out search parties to track our ship down. We have to get in there and hit them before they can think to do that."

The table was strewn with heatsinks, weapons, armor augmentations—indeed, they'd transformed 'war room' into a much more literal phrase. Miranda, who had been sifting through a pile of said heatsinks, gestured towards the hologram in turn. "There's at least two egress points we can easily reach from here, and both of them lead towards that huge atrium," she noted. "I'd bet the Collectors are storing their prisoners in there; it'd make the most sense, considering how much space they must take up. We could go through either of these and make our way to the atrium."

Not particularly interested in drawing attention to herself, Jack led Thane over to one end of the table and settled in next to Zaeed and Grunt, both of whom offered them a stiff nod by way of greetings. She grabbed one of the scram rails off the table and began fitting it onto her shotgun as the discussion continued.

Shepard nodded, scratching at his closely-shaven scalp. "Or we could take both, if we split into two teams and hit them from both directions at once. A pincer attack—they'll have to split their forces to try to defend against it, and once one group gets to the atrium, the Collectors don't stand a chance at holding it."

"Hrm. Problem presents itself." It was Mordin, of course; the salarian stepped forward and focused his omnitool on the layout, highlighting the atrium in question. "Schematics indicate security protocol in place. Doors locked, of course, but controls only accessible from inside atrium. Alternate means of entry necessary to allow both teams access; personally, suggest-" He paused for a breath. "-ventilation shafts."

Miranda's lips pursed as she considered it. "Going through the vents, hacking the system to get the doors open...yes. It could work. A single person could pull it off, theoretically. With the security the Collectors likely have in place, that'd be a heavy risk..."

"I'll do it."

All eyes turned towards the person who had spoken up, and who now hefted his shotgun to rest it against a shoulder. "Heavy risks are my specialty," Jacob added with a smirk. "Those vents look big enough for me to fit into, and I've got an Eviscerator and a Serrice amp that says the Collectors' defenses aren't quite good enough. If anybody needs to take one for the team, consider me the first in line to volunteer."

Jack shrugged, grabbing a bandolier loaded with thermal clips off the table and passing it down to Thane. Taylor had some serious balls, she had to give him that, but it was his life; if he wanted to throw it away it wasn't her problem.

Apparently their commander had a different perspective on the situation. "I appreciate that, Jacob," he began with a familiar grin. "You're a hell of a soldier, and I don't doubt you can do it, but I'm going to need someone who's more tech-savvy for this. The longer those doors stay closed, the bigger the risk—not just to whoever's doing the hacking, but to the whole squad." He clapped the other man on the shoulder. "I'm not going to risk anybody needlessly. Tali, think you can handle the Collectors' systems?"

Across the room, Tali looked up from her omnitool and swallowed visibly. "...I can do it," she answered. "Just make sure you give me some cover, and I'll have the doors taken care of, guaranteed." There was a hint of a waver in her voice, but the steely undertones made it clear that she would brook no objections.

"Sounds good." Shepard turned to the rest of the room, counting up the groups. "All right...two squads. I'll lead one of them through this entrance." He motioned to a wide-looking tunnel that lead straight down, not unlike a ramp, towards the atrium. "This path's a little more wide-open, so I'll bring along some of our long-distance specialists. We'll be able to cut a swath through this chamber and get to the atrium door while Tali navigates the vents and gets everything unlocked."

"Sounds like a plan," Miranda agreed. She examined the alternate path; it was not unlike a spiral staircase heading down into the atrium, and would likely be fairly cramped. "This path's got less room to maneuver in, so my team will have most of the close-quarters-combat experts. We should be at the atrium around the same time that you get there."

Jack took a quick glance around the room. It was silent, but she could make out _that_ look on more than one face. Well, fuck that, if they weren't going to speak up, she was. "Uh, question," she called out. "Did I miss Shepard saying 'oh, and by the way, the cheerleader's leading the other team' at some point?"

The other woman glowered. "Jack, this isn't the time for your little authority-issues routine. We're trying to plan a mission here."

It was too late; the dam had officially been breached. "I don't recall hearing Shepard say that either," Garrus spoke up from his corner. One eye narrowed behind his targeting visor. "Hell, half of us don't even _trust_ you. What's keeping you from putting Cerberus's interests over the mission?"

"There's no difference between the two," Miranda retorted, hands firmly planted on her hips. Jack had to give her credit, she wasn't backing down despite the rising amount of opposition. "This _is_ a Cerberus mission, you'll recall."

A low snarl rumbled in Grunt's throat. "But Shepard is our battlemaster," he insisted. "It's his decision to make, not yours, and you have to abide by that just like the rest of us."

"My oath is sworn to Shepard, not to Cerberus," Samara stated flatly, her lips tightly pursed.

Thane finished buckling on his bandolier and turned to attach one to Jack. "I was hired by Shepard, not the Illusive Man," he said. "It's my professional prerogative to take orders exclusively from him."

Everyone turned expectantly to Zaeed, who looked up to see a room full of glances aimed at him and, after a moment of contemplation, shrugged. "...What?" he asked. "Like I give a goddamn who's in charge."

The XO sighed with exasperation and turned to Shepard. "Look, this isn't a popularity contest, Commander," she exclaimed. "We need someone with experience in squad tactics and developed leadership capabilities in order to get that second group through to the atrium."

"You're right," Shepard agreed with a nod.

"Thank you, Commander. It's nice to see someone putting the mission before their personal-"

He turned to the rest of the room. "Zaeed, Legion, Thane, Mordin, and Miranda will be coming with me. Garrus, you're taking Jacob, Grunt, Jack, and Samara down the other pathway. At the center, Tali will open the doors to the atrium and we'll haul ass inside, then try to find our crew members."

The turian's mandibles pulled back in what probably passed for a mischievous grin. "Understood, Commander."

Miranda glared icily, but to her credit, she neither protested nor made a scene, instead opting to simply fall into line. "Let's get moving," she snapped. "The sooner we get to that atrium, the better."

"All right, people!" Shepard announced, waving an arm towards the door. "No speeches, you're all better than that. You know what's on the line here, and you know what's expected of you. It's been an honor to serve with you all, and I know you'll make me proud today no matter what happens. Now let's get moving!" The group began to break up as everyone grabbed any remaining gear off the table, formed into a vaguely orderly line, and started filing out of the briefing room.

"No speeches. Ha!" Zaeed snorted, checking the sights on his rifle. "Best sonuvabitch _I've_ ever served under, that's for goddamned sure."

Jack, at the back of the line, managed a half-smirk at that. She had to admit, it was a refreshing change from what she'd expected. Next to her, Thane sidled up and offered a smile. She squeezed his hand, flashing a grin back. "You ready for this, Thane?"

"As ready as I will ever be, I suspect," he answered, squeezing back. "Be careful."

"I'll, uh...see you in the atrium, okay?"

"You will."

They paused there at the exit to the briefing room and hesitated awkwardly, both of them at a loss for anything else to say, but neither willing to terminate the conversation and split off quite yet. After a second, Jack pushed herself up onto her tiptoes and caught the drell in another kiss. A long moment passed in enjoyable silence; the kiss was rough, lusty, and full of life, not unlike Jack herself, and it seemed a shame to let it go prematurely. Finally, though, it was necessary to break it off, leaving both of them catching their breath and more than a little enthused about coming back from the mission alive.

"Kick some Collector ass," Jack whispered.

Thane nodded with a smirk. "And you as well, _siha_."

They turned and headed in opposite directions towards their respective teams, determined to go out and face whatever hell awaited them in the Collector base, and _equally_ determined to come back in one piece. Regardless of what happened on the mission, neither intended to be robbed of what precious time they had left.


	13. Chapter 13

Mass Effect is the creative property of Bioware.

* * *

**Thirteen**

"They're trying to flank!" Garrus called. "One of you, seal off that side passage!"

Jack reached out with her biotics, wrenching a chunk of the ceiling loose, and brought the roof down quite literally upon the heads of several unfortunate Collectors. As rubble closed the tunnel's offshoot, preventing the entry of any more enemy reinforcements, a single Collector dove clear of the falling rocks and managed to slide straight into the midst of their squad. A quick shotgun blast to the head made sure it wouldn't rise to trouble them again; just to make sure there wouldn't be any more such problems, Jack held up for a moment to peer down the back of the tunnel at the group's flank. Seeing no additional Collectors behind them, she turned to catch up.

The turian nodded to her. "Good job. More coming at ten o'clock; take cover, people. Samara and I will lay down covering fire so Grunt can get in close."

Insertion was going remarkably well so far. Their group had torn through any Collectors they'd encountered in the narrow, confined spaces of the tunnel, and if the comm chatter was any indicator, Shepard's group was getting by as well. Garrus was a competent leader for the squad, all things considered; he knew well enough to give directions according to his teammates' strengths, and they, in turn, were disciplined enough to listen. At that very moment, Grunt was circling around the bend in the tunnel, taking up a position behind a rock outcropping as the rest of the team kept several of their Prothean adversaries pinned behind a guardrail with a hailstorm of bullets.

"In position!" the krogan roared. "Here it comes!"

As Grunt stood up, however, a shot from further down the tunnel staggered him, and he was forced to duck back into cover. Jack was suddenly aware of a hand on her arm; she turned to see Jacob pointing down the tunnel towards a freshly-decloaked Collector with a sniper rifle. "Let's take him out!" the man yelled. "I'll set him up, you knock him down!" He didn't exactly wait for confirmation, assuming that Jack would be more than happy to do some 'knocking down'-fortunately he was right, and as he_I _ pulled the Collector through the air with his biotics, the convict hit it with a warp that tore it limb from chitinous limb.

The comm receiver crackled. "This is Tali. I'm in position at the atrium, but there's another valve blocking the rest of the vent. I need you to hit the manual release before I can get inside."

"Copy that; we're on our way." Shepard sounded a bit strained, which made sense; from the snatches of comm chatter Jack had heard, his team had encountered heavier resistance than theirs. "We'll have to clear through here-"

"**I know you feel this, Shepard**."

"-and that goddamn thing just won't _die_," the Commander finished, raising his volume to drown out the deep voice in the background. "Hang on, Tali."

Jack leaned out of cover to glance at their erstwhile targets. With the sniper down, Grunt's charge had been a success, and the bloodstains around the wall were proof. He was in the process of finishing off one last downed Collector with a shell in the back by the time the rest of the team made their way to him, and took a moment to shoot Jack a wild-eyed, bloodthirsty grin. "At last, a fight worthy of a krogan!"

"Hope you're not spent yet," she answered dryly, pointing towards the end of the tunnel. Just up ahead was a massive door, forged from the same metal as the outside of the station and barring the rest of their path. This had to be the entrance to the atrium...but it was locked from the other side. They had to hope Tali and Shepard's team would pull through.

Behind them, Garrus was already speaking into his comm. "Garrus here. We've reached the entrance to the atrium, and need the door open ASAP."

Gunshots echoed down the way they'd come as a new group of Collectors began to pour forth...but more ominously, the buzzing of seeker swarms thundered right behind them. Although there wasn't much cover at the entrance, the squad ducked down as best they could and returned fire. Collectors dropped left and right, particularly after Garrus launched a well-timed grenade into their midst, but a much bigger problem was approaching: a black, writhing cloud of seeker swarms surged towards them at lightning speed.

"Watch out!" Jacob shouted over the din. "Swarms incoming, get your heads down!"

That wasn't going to do any good, though. The antidote Mordin had devised would protect them from the paralyzing venom that seekers carried, but Jack was willing to bet that their stingers were still _sharp_, and in that kind of quantity, they could probably shred an average-sized organic in no time. Simply ducking and covering wasn't going to save them; in a matter of seconds they'd be diced unless there was a way to actively repel or block them-

-block them. _That was it_.

In the last few seconds before the swarms could overrun them, Jack stood up from her spot behind a ruined guardrail, gathered all the biotic energy she could muster into a single strike, and _pushed_. The shimmering corona of an energy wall rippled forth from her outstretched palms and stretched across the space in front of them, bathing the tunnel in an incandescent blue...and lo and behold, when the seeker swarms crashed into it, the wall wobbled from the pressure, but it held fast.

Still, holding fast didn't mean it was easy. She could feel the sweat beading on her forehead, blood thundering in her ears as she pushed against the combined force of ten thousand tiny, homicidal machines. If Tali didn't get that door open soon they were well and truly fucked...

The pressure eased suddenly, and Jack dared to open an eye to see what had happened. Samara, having quickly caught on to her strategy, had stopped returning fire as well and added her own considerable biotic strength to the barrier. With the Justicar providing backup, Jack was able to breathe again; the tremendous pressure against her entire body had lightened up to the point of being only tolerably strenuous. Despite the danger of their situation, she felt a feral grin sliding onto her face. "How do you like _that_, assholes?" she bellowed down the tunnel at the bewildered Collectors. "Not so tough without your fuckin' bees, are you?"

A buzz from the comm interrupted any further attempts at taunting, and Tali's chirp filled the space around them. "I'm in! Garrus, your door's almost open...give me three seconds and you'll be in."

Three seconds. Jack glanced to one side, and caught Samara's eye.

They shoved, hard and simultaneously.

As the biotic barrier raced down the tunnel, sending the seekers crashing into a wall of rock at speeds usually reserved for joyrides in the Hammerhead, air began to hiss from the atrium door. It slid open, revealing Tali'Zorah manning the terminal. "Get in!" she exclaimed, beckoning with a three-fingered hand. "I'll shut it once you're in here."

The squad didn't have to be told twice; they turned tail and ran for it, diving through the doorway. "Get it closed!" Garrus ordered as he came up from his roll. "Those swarms will be back any second!"

Although stopping the seeker swarms had been (if Jack was allowed a little self-promotion) pretty awesome, the sound of the door slamming shut again was possibly the most relief-inducing sound she'd heard all night. There was no time to stop and celebrate, though, as Shepard's team was still stuck behind the other door. Tali scampered across the room and tapped at the terminal with machine gun-caliber speed, and sure enough, the corresponding door jerked open with a hiss and a squeal of rusting metal. Jack's heart leapt in her chest as the squad came pouring in, finally settling when she saw Thane pass through backwards (and still taking shots at the Collectors as he retreated). Shepard was the last in, clearly out of breath and with his kinetic barriers having taken a beating from that last charge to get the vents clear. "More behind us," he managed, ejecting a heatsink from his Locust and swapping in a fresh one. "Tali, close the door, and we'll cover you."

"I'm on it." The quarian typed away, but her movements becoming increasingly rushed, and it was swiftly becoming evident that something was amiss. "Damn it!" she exclaimed, voice wavering with frustration. "After that first bypass, something in their system activated additional security protocols; I can't get the door shut!"

Jack hurried up to the 'frontline' they'd established by the door, taking her spot next to Thane. The shotgun was useless at this kind of range, but she had a pistol ready and unleashed a carefully-aimed flurry of shots towards the Collectors. There was just enough time to spot a small, tense smile from the drell as she reloaded; she did her best to return it, then resumed firing just as a burst of yellow light consumed one of the entrenched assassins.

"**I am assuming direct control**."

"Come on, Tali!" Shepard yelled over the gunfire. "They've got reinforcements coming!"

Tali's response came mostly in the form of a string of Khelish obscenities. "Keelah, what kind of firewall is this?" she growled, practically slamming her fingers down on the keys. "Come on, you little bosh'tet, let me _in_..."

A form at the end of the line rose and moved to the quarian's side; Jack could make out the warbling of FTL transmissions as Legion channeled its signal into the Collector network. "Uploading trojan runtimes...multiple-program infiltration successful," it announced. "Executing sudo command."

Across the hallway's wide span, the Harbinger rose from cover, leveling one arm with the doorway. "**Impede Shepard's retreat. Slay the quarian**." A ball of seething yellow energy began to expand within its palm.

"Almost..."

Garrus snarled, pulling himself out of cover and spraying the charging line of Collectors with gunfire. "Get some suppressing fire on their lines!" he bellowed. "_Nothing gets through that door!_"

They held the entrance, some crouched in the front, some standing behind and firing over their comrades' heads. Ten men and women that, for all their disparities, acted as one monstrously efficient weapon for those fateful twenty seconds. The Collectors charged the door five at a time, and died screaming five at a time as a rain of lead poured into their ranks.

"The primary firewall has been deactivated," Legion announced. "Creator Tali'Zorah, your intrusion should now be significantly less impeded by-"

"Yes, yes, I'm in!" Tali shouted. "Shutting the door!"

As the machinery groaned around them and sprang to life, the Harbinger fired its shot, an impossibly huge ball of pure heat that launched across the chamber, rocketing straight towards the terminal and with it, Tali and Legion. It was impossibly fast; there would be no way to dodge it as it surged forward and...

...exploded harmlessly on the other side of the heavy door, which had glided shut.

The combined expression of relief at finding themselves alone in the atrium was profound. Scattered cheers went up around the group, mostly from Jacob and Shepard, the latter of whom managed to hug both Tali and Legion at the same time. The quarian had all but collapsed against the wall, numb with excitement and clearly astonished to be still alive; she had to be helped up by the Commander and the geth. As the reunited team spread out, searching the atrium, Jack turned towards Thane, who had paused to check the sights on his rifle during their sudden lull.

He looked up and offered her a curt smile. "_Siha_. I take it you had no difficulties?"

It was strange to consider, but Thane on the battlefield was leagues different from Thane elsewhere. While he was ever the gentleman on the Normandy, always ready with an understated display of affection or a pleasant word, Thane tended to be ice-cool, professional, and just terse enough when on the job. (Jack had to admit, it was kinda hot.)

"Went well enough," she answered, glossing over the near-disaster with the seekers. "If the rest of the job goes like this, we'll be back on the Normandy by-"

"Shepard!" The voice was Miranda's, uncharacteristically frantic as she waved at the group from across the room. "The crew! I've found them!"

By the time the two hurried over, the rest of the squad was already hard at work wrenching open Collector pods and extricating the crew members inside. Dr. Chakwas was seated on the lip of an opened pod, looking about dazedly as Shepard spoke to her. To their right, more pods were strewn about, in various stages of destruction as the team worked on them. Zaeed was prying one open by himself; Jack stepped up and assisted him by breaking the glass with a strike from her shotgun. Thane joined in at the other end, and by working together, the three managed to tear the front of the pod open, revealing Yeoman Chambers halfway out of a comatose state.

"What...where..." The yeoman was wide-eyed and pale, and looked as if she were about to burst into tears. Thane helped her sit up, lifting her out of the pod with Zaeed's help and setting her down with the rest of the shaken crew. She clung to him, trembling, and drew inward when the drell placed her next to Ken and Gabby.

"Nobody's getting left behind, but they can't make it back to the ship on their own," Shepard was saying. "Mordin, I need you to get the crew back to the Normandy and see if they need medical attention. I'll get in touch with you if we end up needing your help down here."

"Understood." Mordin fiddled briefly with his omnitool. "Will escort all survivors back and examine them." Something apparently occurred to the salarian just then; he started briefly and turned back to look over the crew members. "Oh! Had forgotten: any spare weaponry? Collector reinforcements a definite possibility: crew may need to defend themselves, should ambush occur."

The Commander rubbed at his chin. "Good point...those tunnels are probably choked with Collectors now. All right. Legion," and here he beckoned the geth over, "you're with Mordin. Get them back to the Normandy, and make sure no Collectors follow you to the ship."

Legion nodded wordlessly, and began herding the crew onto their feet with Mordin's aid. As the haggard-looking group set off towards a tunnel, Shepard took charge of the group again. "EDI's been able to pin down a large energy signature at the core of the base," he began, pointing towards a spot on the schematic emitting from Miranda's omnitool. "Now, our way is blocked by another one of those doors, but this time, there's only one path from our side of the base that will give us a chance to open it. I'm thinking if we send most of our people to distract the Collector forces, a small group could make their way through this central chamber and get to the terminal, opening the door for the rest of the team."

Jack's brow furrowed. It was a good plan in theory, but how small would that group have to be? And what about the Collectors? Even if they were distracted, that central chamber was gigantic; there had to be room for some of the flying laser husk things, and then the seeker swarms...

"That tunnel's bound to be packed with seeker swarms," Miranda said, apparently channeling Jack's thoughts (much to the latter's surprise). "We'd be killed, even with Mordin's antidote, before we could make it to the other side."

"Damn it..." Shepard punched a fist into one palm. "If only there were a way to repel those swarms..."

Jacob, who had taken a spot at the back of the group, spoke up. "There is!" he exclaimed. "Biotics can stop them. It's how we escaped the seekers on the way here; Jack and Samara put up a barrier and they couldn't get through it."

"A barrier?" the Commander asked. "You're saying we could block the swarms with a constant biotic shield?"

"I saw it with my own eyes, Commander," Garrus agreed. "As long as you've got someone with the skill and concentration to keep a shield up around the whole group, I think you'd be able to get through that central chamber. It looks like a fairly short trip, especially if the Collectors are distracted enough to clear out of it."

Shepard stepped back and took a look around the crew, rubbing at his closely-cropped scalp. "Do we have any volunteers? I'm not really the go-to man on what makes a good biotic, so..."

Jack glanced around the group. Well, shit, if nobody was going to do it-

"In theory, any biotic should be able to do it," Miranda announced, turning off her omnitool. "I'll take care of it, Shepard; you grab two more people and we'll head through while the second team gets that distraction running."

The wheels were clearly turning in Shepard's head as he looked over his squad, trying to decide who to choose. He chewed at his lip for a moment, then, at last, beckoned Miranda over to his side. "All right. Miranda, you're in charge of keeping that shield up. Jacob, I want you as fire support and shield backup; if Miranda gets incapacitated somehow, we'll need you to step up and form a new barrier ASAP."

With a nod, the security chief stepped up next to Shepard. "Understood, Commander. I won't let you down."

"And..." Shepard glanced over at Jack's end of the group, and finally smiled, reaching to a decision. "Zaeed, you're our heavy hitter for this one. Still got your incendiary gear?"

"Oh, you've got no idea, Shepard," Zaeed rasped. A wicked grin came over his face, one with distinct trappings of 'I know something you don't', as he crossed over to join them. "No goddamned idea."

"I'm...not sure I like the sound of that, but let's do this, people. Garrus, take the team out and give those bastards hell." Shepard looked over the remaining members of the team. "I'm counting on all of you to get their attention."

Garrus motioned to the team. "No worries, Shepard. The distraction will go fine."

* * *

A rain of bullets whizzed over Garrus' head as he ducked behind the ledge. "Shepard!" he shouted into the comm. "The distraction is going too well!"

He was more or less right. They had set out with the intention of raising as much hell as possible, all the way through the series of winding passageways leading to the central chamber...and they had succeeded with a vengeance. In the past half-hour, Jack had seen four times as many Collectors as her past run-ins with them, _combined_, and at present, the team had taken refuge in one of the passage's many alcoves, taking fire at all sides from a horde of insectoid shock troopers.

The door was perhaps ten meters away, at most, but there was simply no way to reach it; the constant stream of Collectors pouring from a side entrance kept them totally pinned down. Every time Jack popped up for more than the time it took to throw a biotic shockwave at the enemy lines, a particle beam streaked past and nearly decapitated her, not to mention the hailstorm of ammunition that would inevitably follow. Next to her, Thane had slightly more luck by going prone and occasionally rolling out for a shot, but it seemed like for every Collector the team killed, two or three more appeared to take its place.

"You have to hold out a little longer," Shepard answered over the comm. "We're a little more than halfway through the chamber, but it's slow going...gotta keep the shield running, and these husks aren't letting up. Hang in there!"

"Easy for _you_ to say," Jack muttered. She turned to the stockpile of tech grenades Tali had created, snagging one off the top, and formed a ball of biotic energy around it. "All right, here comes the next one, people. You ready to fuck their shit up?"

"See if you can overheat that particle beam," Garrus instructed her, crouched on the other side of the makeshift barricade. "We'll try to take down that section before they finish changing heatsinks...what we really need, though, is to gain some ground towards the door. We're not getting anywhere if we stay pinned down over here."

Jack bit her lip. "Gonna need something better for clearing them out, then-"

It was at exactly this point, when she looked back on it later, that the mission began to completely go to shit. It started innocently enough, with Mordin's voice buzzing over the comm. "Shepard! Complications! Reached Normandy—have rounded up survivors in medical bay, checking for medical concerns. Nothing major...not important, though! Bigger concern!"

"What? What's going on?" Shepard sounded alarmed, though it was difficult to tell, seeing as how he was having to shout over the buzz of seeker swarms.

"Legion, Shepard!" The scientist was definitely frantic, even for him. "Ambushed by Collectors during egress to Normandy! No casualties, but Legion acted as distraction—drew Collectors into the tunnels. Haven't seen him since! Might have been killed..."

Somewhat unexpectedly, the geth's voice resonated in their earpieces. "This platform remains operational, despite repeated attempts at deactivation by Prothean constructs. We will return to the rendezvous point and render assistance as necessary." Gunfire echoed in the background; it was evident that Legion was still engaged with the enemy.

"All right," Shepard answered. "We'll see you there. Proceed with caution."

Jack grinned, and tapped the comm. "Hey, robot, remember what I taught you. Don't let any of those Collectors fuck with you, all right?"

There was a pause, and then: "...Directives acknowledged. Proceeding."

"All right..." The convict hoisted her biotically-charged grenade. "Get ready to-"

"**I am assuming direct control of this form.**"

"Oh, _dammit_!" Garrus bellowed, and that was pretty much all the warning they got before another energy sphere exploded against the wall behind them, showering the team in dust and rubble. Another followed shortly afterwards, and if they hadn't been completely immobilized before, they were now. Jack decided things could not possibly get worse.

Things got worse.

"Shepard!" It was Miranda, sounding for all the world like she'd just run a marathon. "I can't hold the shield any longer...it's going to..."

The blue streak from the Commander was pretty damn impressive, Jack had to admit. "Jacob, take the barrier! Quick!" A spray of gunshots accompanied his swearing. "Zaeed! Husks on the left!"

Garrus stood up to take a shot at the Harbinger and immediately toppled onto his back, having taken a ball of plasma directly to his kinetic barriers. He growled, pulling himself back upright. "As long as that thing's there, there's just too many Collectors to press the attack." Motioning towards Grunt and Samara, who had been plugging away at the Collectors from cover, he glanced around the group. "All right. We need somebody to draw their fire; if they're focusing in one place at one time, we can rush the door and overwhelm them. Now, as leader, it's my responsibility to take that position, so-"

"If a distraction was all you needed," Samara broke in, loading a fresh heatsink into her rifle, "you should have simply asked." She turned to Grunt, holding out a hand. "Grunt, my friend, I will need to borrow your shotgun."

With a puzzled blink, the krogan handed it over. "Look, you don't have to do this alone-"

"Thank you kindly." The Justicar stood, a corona of pale biotic light draping itself over her shields, and glanced back to the team. Her jaw was set, lips pulled taut with resolve. "You will have your opportunity to charge in ten seconds. I suggest using those grenades." With that, she turned...

"No!" Garrus shouted as the asari jumped the barricade. "What are you doing? Don't break rank!"

"Samara!" That was...Thane, inexplicably; Jack glanced at the drell, puzzled as to why he had called out to stop her. It was too late, either way, because she was charging head-on into an ocean of Collectors, Avenger in one hand and Claymore in the other.

To Garrus' credit, he improvised quickly. "The grenades!" he shouted, gesturing towards the pile. His intentions were obvious, and Jack snagged another handful of the explosives, feeding them into her biotic sphere. She stood, the air above them mercifully clear for the moment, and hurled them into the midst of the Collector ranks; next to her, Thane and Grunt followed suit, and Garrus and Tali joined in a moment later. The spheres arced over the enemy's heads and exploded in a crackle of electricity, temporarily frying their weaponry to the point of uselessness. By the time the Collectors realized what had happened, they had bigger things to worry about—namely the thousand-year-old Justicar in their midst.

The turian dove out of their improvised trench. "Go, go, go!"

Jack was right behind him, racing at full speed towards the door. A horde of Collectors still lay between them and their destination, but that horde was progressively decreasing by the second as Samara, blindingly bright with resonant biotic energy, unloaded both barrels into their ranks. The Harbinger itself turned to assault her, and barely got more than a step towards the Justicar before its head disintegrated in a flash from the Claymore.

Up ahead, Grunt lowered his head and bellowed a krogan war cry; by the time the Collectors in front of them took their attention from Samara to focus on the charging krogan, it was much too late, and he barreled through their midst like a thresher maw in a den of pyjacks. Jack followed through the opening he'd cleared, and as the _crack_ of Thane's rifle split the air next to her, she was reminded to follow suit and bowled over another row of Collectors with a biotic charge.

More gunshots were beginning to echo over the passageway now as the Collectors' weapons came back online. Samara's shield and barrier flickered from the barrage of impacts, even as she turned and mowed down another group of the chitinous beasts. The heatsink indicator on her assault rifle bleeped, but rather than waste time reloading, she discarded the weapon, continuing to fire the shotgun. Still, the rest of her defenses fell fairly quickly, and just as the shield dropped, the Harbinger began to materialize from a drone behind her.

"**Direct intervention is**-"

The being exploded in a flash of light as Samara turned, driving her fist through its chest. Energy began to surge from the guardian on the Justicar's left.

"**You have accomplished noth**-"

The shotgun was braced against its torso as fast as the asari could whirl in place, and the subsequent gunshot blew its torso into ashes on the wind.

By this point, Jack had reached the door, with the rest of the squad right next to her. She turned back towards the brawl going on in the center of the passageway, and seeking to help Samara, opened fire on the teeming mass of Collectors with her shotgun. Thane knelt beside her and joined in the onslaught, striking down enemy after enemy, his jaw set in an unreadable expression.

Behind Jack, Tali searched fruitlessly for a control panel. "I can't even remotely access it," she sighed. There should be a haptic interface terminal on the other side that will retract the door into the ceiling, but we can't get to it from this side."

"Taylor's down, Shepard!" It was Zaeed, over the comm. "Shield's gone! Watch yourself!"

The Commander sounded downright ragged as he answered. "I've got him; come on, backs against the wall, people, and watch for the swarms! Garrus, come in! We've reached the door, but...something's wrong! It's been closed off, and we can't get into the central chamber!"

"Copy that, Commander," the turian answered. "We can't get through ours either. Did you just lose your shield?"

"Yeah...look, we'll keep trying to get this door open, but there's seekers everywhere, and-_Zaeed, watch out!_"

Tali and Garrus exchanged a look of horror as the comm channel filled up with incoherent shouting. Most of it was Zaeed's; he sounded...furious, for lack of a better word, and actually managed to not be drowned out by the strange-sounding roar that swept over the channel a second later before it cut out altogether.

"The _hell_ with this!" Grunt spat, storming up to the door. "I'm not gonna sit around while the Battlemaster's in danger! Let's get this thing open!" He crouched, bending his knees, and felt around at the bottom of the door until he managed to gain a solid grip, then heaved upwards, clearly straining.

Next to him, Garrus fired a few shots at Samara's attackers. "Grunt, that door has to weigh tons. It can't be-"

He was almost immediately shouted down as Grunt let out a gut-wrenching bellow. "It can!" he roared, and as Jack glanced back, she had to do a double-take, because lo-and-fucking-behold, the door was _beginning to rise_. It was only an inch or so off the ground, but by hell, that krogan was lifting the door off the ground. His eyes bulged, and his entire body shook from the effort as he forced it further upwards, to Garrus' open-mouthed shock. It was almost to his waist now...

Samara had taken her fair share of gunshot wounds at this point, though from the swiftness of her movements, it was nearly impossible to tell. Dozens of drones, alongside their brethren firing their assault rifles, charged forward towards the now-bloodied Justicar, and one in the front began to shift and warp.

"**Assuming direc**-"

Out of heatsinks, Samara lunged with a cold, remorseless resolve and loosed a biotically-empowered kick that launched the Harbinger's head clean off its shoulders. The blow was impressive, but she almost immediately paid for it: as another drone dove onto her from behind, she stumbled, and then another leapt onto her, and another, and another, clawing and striking.

"They're overwhelming her!" Thane gasped. He looked almost ready to charge in after Samara, and his shots picked up in speed as he tried to pick off the numerous Collectors swarming the Justicar. Jack followed suit, even pulling a few away with biotics, but the more that they killed, the more seemed to pile onto Samara...

"I AM _KROGAN!_" The door was actually up to Grunt's chest by now, and Tali ducked under it, hurrying into the interior of the chamber. "I AM _PURE KROGAN!"_ He gave a final heave, putting his whole body into it, and then there he stood, a monolith of power, his arms outstretched over his head, bracing six thousand pounds of reinforced steel above him as gunfire peppered his back ineffectually. Although his muscles trembled from the exertion, he hardly wavered, and the frenzied roar from his throat was not one of pain, but of battle-lust. "Now _go_!"

The Harbinger burst forth from another Collector's frame, and stood triumphantly over the mass of writhing drones that had pinned Samara to the ground. Jack felt a vicious snarl rise in her throat, and she brought her shotgun level to take aim at the creature.

"**Asari...I know you feel th**-"

The world exploded.

That was really the only way Jack could rationalize what happened next. The light from the center of the pile was like staring into a supernova, and the explosion's impact actually knocked her over as the shattered bodies of Collectors flew overhead, strewn every which way like pieces from broken marionettes. Rubble fell from the ceiling, scattering over the ground. Dust gleamed in the air from the reflection of the glowing biotic bubble that had formed the tremendous explosion's center...and as the bubble faded, Justicar Samara, dripping violet from dozens of wounds and looking for all the world like a bloodied angel of vengeance, dropped to the ground and landed on her feet.

"For only the poised blade gives pause to the wicked," she murmured, almost delirious. "...And only with powerful arm may the dark heart be pierced in retribution."

"Samara!" Thane called, beckoning. "We have to get inside!"

It was almost in a daze that the Justicar turned and stumbled towards them, but she hurried past and made it through the door, followed swiftly by Jack, and then Thane bringing up the rear. With a jubilant shout, Grunt stepped forward and released the door; it crashed back into the ground hard enough to shake the room around them, and he bellowed in exultation once more. "Hah! They thought they were safe behind their pitiful little walls! Did you see that?"

Samara passed by him, absently holding out the shotgun. "Thank you."

Once he'd accepted it, the asari wandered past him, next to the spot where Tali was working on overriding the other door and letting Shepard's team in. She paused just long enough for Thane to approach her; the drell took a quick look over her form and gasped in dismay. Samara's suit was almost equal parts purple and red at this point; deep violet blood trickled from numerous gashes and puncture wounds, and was beginning to pool on the floor around her.

"You're injured," he managed, taking a cautious step forward. "Hold on, we'll get the medigel out once Shepard's team is in."

After a moment, the Justicar smiled. It was the first time he could recall seeing the expression reach all the way to her eyes. "You're a good man, Thane," she whispered. "Make sure you take care of her."

With that, she collapsed, and he barely managed to catch her as the door slid open.

* * *

Despite the survival of both her and Thane, Jack was feeling more than a little nervous as she raced towards the door, coming up behind Tali and Garrus. The sounds they'd last heard from Shepard's comm weren't good in the slightest, and she wasn't too thrilled at the prospect of losing Zaeed-despite their habit of ribbing each other constantly, the old bastard was a riot, and a damn good person to have at your back when a gunfight broke out in a bar.

"Got it!" Tali said, pressing a final button on the haptic terminal. "Door's opening..."

Sure enough, the door slid open, and Shepard, who had been leaning with his back to it as he shot at the incoming Collectors, nearly fell into the room with them. He barely saved himself from tripping and backed up, still firing; next came Miranda, looking exhausted as hell and helping Jacob to move, and finally, in the back, was Zaeed-

-Zaeed _with a flamethrower_, shouting challenges for all to hear as he swept a stream of burning dentra oil across the gathering seeker swarms. With every blast from the Firestorm, the swarms pulled away, shrieking, as more of them plummeted to the ground in flames. Zaeed laughed heartily as he backed towards the door, giving the cloud of seekers another puff of fire for good measure. "That's all you sons of bitches have got?" he shouted in defiance. "All the mercs in the galaxy couldn't take out Zaeed goddamned Massani, and your piss-ant operation won't do it either!"

He looked almost disappointed when the door slammed in front of him, but unslung the flamethrower and flashed Jack a grin. "Well, things went tits-up, but it looks like we got through okay."

"Guess so," she agreed, though her tone mirrored her feelings: anything but convinced. "The Justicar's all shot up...how's Taylor?"

"I'm all right," Jacob answered, standing up straight and extricating himself from Miranda's grasp. "Husk knocked the wind out of me is all. I'll be fine." Next to him, Shepard hurried over to Thane's side to treat Samara's injuries.

With nothing immediately pressing her priorities, Jack followed, returning to Thane's side. Shepard and Tali had already begun applying medigel to the Justicar's various gashes, and after a moment, she was able to sit up, leaning against the wall behind her. "It'll be okay, Samara," Tali said reassuringly, massaging the gel into a fairly deep cut on the asari's shoulder. "Looks like you didn't rupture any organs, and we just need to get this bleeding stopped..."

It looked like everything was, if not 'okay', at least passable. The convict stood, moving to the side so she wouldn't be in the way, and sat down next to the panting Grunt, who was just beginning to come off his adrenaline high. After a moment, Thane joined her, sliding an arm around the small of her back.

She managed a small half-smile. "Well, it could be going worse."

"Indeed."

A strange, inhuman bellow echoed from inside the bowels of the base, deep inside the abyss across the room from them. Thane glanced in that direction, his eyes narrowing. "I suspect the worst is yet to come, however," he murmured. "That was...rather disquieting."

"Hah!" Grunt laughed, smacking his chest with a big, meaty fist. "Whatever it is, we'll tear it apart like we did the Collectors! A glorious fight, and then we'll go home, throw down some ryncol, and spend the week quad-deep in the finest females the galaxy has to offer."

Jack snorted.

"Ah, right," the krogan amended. "Sorry, Jack."

"Don't be," she answered. "When we get back, I plan on grabbing Krios here before we're halfway through the airlock and fucking him until he can't stand up."

It was the drell's turn to snort. "Is that so?"

"Hope that wasn't a no," Jack groused.

"Anything but, _siha_," he assured her. "I've found in the past that happiness to be alive is a remarkable aphrodisiac."

There was no more time for exhausted jibing and banter; the Commander had stood and, along with Tali, was helping Samara to her feet. They were here and ready, at the brink of a precipice from which many of them had never expected to return. It was time to gather and plunge forth into the last leg of their mission...and hopefully to beat the odds and come out breathing.

They had a lot left to live for, after all.

* * *

**NEXT UPDATE: **The Grand Finale


	14. Chapter 14

Mass Effect is the property of Bioware.

* * *

**Fourteen**

Garrus clambered up onto the transport platform, then extended a hand and helped Tali up behind him. "Well...here we go again."

"I don't think anything more needs to be said, really," Shepard announced, addressing the gathered squad beneath the platform. "All of you know what's expected of you, and I hope you know how proud you've made me. We've made it this far, and...well, I only need you to hold out a little while longer, and we'll blow this base and get back home." He turned and hit a switch on the pedestal behind him, starting the platform's mass effect generators; it lifted off with a lurch and began to drift down into the belly of the Collector base. The Commander fired off a salute, his two closest friends backing him as always, and called out in farewell: "We'll be back! I promise!"

From her vantage point next to Thane, Jack couldn't help but scoff a bit as she watched the 'power trio' fly off. "Promises," she muttered. "A promise and fifty creds'll get you a shiny new heatsink."

"That's not necessarily true, _siha_," the assassin argued, laying a hand on her bare shoulder. "Perhaps you've been let down by others, but have you known me to break my promises?"

Jack mused over that for a long moment, then walked wordlessly back to the door, where the rest of the team had been setting up fortifications. Miranda had taken charge in the absence of both Shepard and Garrus, and for once, nobody was bothering to question her authority. "Finish getting that barricade up," she ordered, watching Grunt push a discarded row of terminals in front of the door. "I checked the lock already; it shorted out from the forced entry, so we won't be able to bar the door conventionally. Jacob, any luck on the other door?"

Across the room, Jacob looked up from the haptic interface panel he'd been pecking at. "I've got it locked," he answered. "If the Collectors want in, they'll have to hack the connection or bring in some serious firepower."

"We should be so lucky," their de facto leader responded, brushing an errant strand of hair behind one ear. "Take up some defensive positions, people. We'll have Collector reinforcements headed this way before long."

Deciding to do exactly that, Jack (with Thane in tow) meandered over behind an overturned guardrail and crouched behind it, leaning on the edge of the improvised barricade. Behind her, Samara rested against the wall, clutching a heavy pistol with white-knuckled fervor. Swift application of medigel had saved the Justicar from an untimely end, but she'd lost enough blood to drop most people; even now, she swayed from time to time, and Jack suspected she had passed out at least once while they had prepared the defenses.

"...No," the convict blurted abruptly as they waited for the inevitable Collector charge. "No, you haven't. You've been good to me, Thane. You showed me there's still shit worth seeing out there, things to live for besides myself. And you're right, you've stayed by me. Just about everybody else cut and run or stabbed me in the back by this point...but not you." Checking the heat gauge on her shotgun, she loaded a new clip into its underside. "You're still here. I respect that; hell, maybe I even _trust_ you a little. That's not something I'm just gonna up and forget."

Thane smiled. "I appreciate that." He set his rifle down atop the barricade, adjusting the sights with the casual fastidiousness of a professional. "You, in turn, have done much for me as well. Through you, I've had a second chance to connect with my family, and I've learned that perhaps, even in these waning hours, life is not as grave as I've always made it out to be." Turning slightly, he lay a hand on Jack's shoulder. "Thank you for that, Jack. I look forward to the rest of our time together."

Despite herself, a tiny, rueful smile crept onto her face. "Yeah. Me too."

"You should smile more often, _siha_," Thane mused, mirroring her expression. "It makes you-"

They were interrupted by a rustling noise behind them. "Do you think," Samara asked, keeping herself sitting upright with obvious effort, "that we could perhaps have this conversation another time?"

A moment of silence went by, and then Thane dutifully turned back towards the door. Jack glared. "Think I liked you better when you were bleedin' out on the floor," she growled, and followed the drell's lead.

* * *

They didn't have to wait long for trouble to come knocking...literally, in this case, as something began steadily crashing against the other side of the door less than five minutes later. Of the seven squad members remaining, six focused their attentions on the shuddering expanse of metal across the room from them; the other (Miranda) turned to conduct a final sweep of the area and make sure everything was in place. "Get ready!" she called. "We've got activity at the door."

The pounding noise quickly increased in volume as the team trained their weapons on the door, which began to sag inward from the force of so many unseen blows. The steel began to reach its breaking point, with spiderweb-shaped cracks appearing all over its center, and Jack could feel sweat beginning to bead on her brow. Whatever kind of weapon the Collectors had, they were getting through the door _quickly_ with it...

"Let 'em come!" Grunt had evidently run out of patience; he was standing up and brandishing his shotgun at the door. "Their toys didn't save them from our strike team, and they won't help them take this room! When they-"

"Shh!" Miranda hissed, holding up a hand. The krogan quieted down (amazingly), and Jack strained to listen along with the rest of the group and hear whatever it was that their leader had picked up on. Sure enough, there was a dull whine lingering in between the repeated impacts on the door. Listening a little more closely, Jack was finally able to put her finger on the noise. It was a moan-no, moans, plural. A whole host of empty, synthesized moans.

Husks.

There had to be a ton of them out there, maybe hundreds, if they were proving capable of tearing the door down this quickly. Miranda kept her cool nicely, but there was no doubt in Jack's mind that the other woman was frantically improvising inside as she barked orders. "Keep picking them off as they come through!" she shouted to the rest of the squad. "If we can get a chokepoint established, they don't stand a chance."

Jack grinned. As if they stood a chance in the first place. Husks were mindless and fragile.

Not fragile enough, though, to be useless against the door, because a hole burst through the sheet of metal a second later and a horde of slavering blue forms began loping out at predatory speeds, heading straight for the set of improvised barricades housing the squad.

"Here they come!" cried Jacob. He pumped his shotgun and scored first blood with a burst of incendiary double-aught rounds that took the entire upper body clear off the husk at the front of the pack. That seemed to be as good a signal to open fire as any, and the entire team opened up, raining death on the shambling hordes as fast as they could get through the door breach. Shards of crystallized flesh scattered all over the entrance as the husks fell apart under their concentrated onslaught. Even Samara had risen to her feet behind Thane and was picking off the creatures with carefully-aimed shots from her pistol.

From the way he laughed as he filled the husks with shotgun rounds, Grunt was having the time of his life. "A massacre!" he roared with glee. "We'll climb out of here on their corpses!"

"Don't get overconfident," Miranda shouted back to him. "We've got a ways to go yet."

"Like shooting fish in a goddamned barrel!" Zaeed interjected. "I'm up for 'going a ways' if it's this easy-"

With a screech of rending metal, the door on the opposite side of the room split down the middle, and a second wave of husks began to swarm through.

Thane was the first to call attention to it. "Our flank is breached!" he announced, and redirected his fire over to that end of the room. Jack and Samara joined him, but the three of them alone weren't quite enough to stem the tide, and with their firepower lost from the main salvo, the original stream of husks began to gain ground as well. The creatures charged straight towards the squad, mouths gaping and arms reaching out greedily...

Miranda swore. "Oh, _hell_! Incoming! Brace for CQC!"

The words were barely out of her mouth before the husks swept into their midst.

One rule that Jack lived by was that with all her guns and biotics, if a fight had devolved into close-quarters combat, something had gone horribly wrong along the way. One did not win a fight with fists, knives, or similar implements so much as one _survived_ it, accepting that you were going to take hits along the way. That was the case at the moment; she disintegrated the first three of the incoming husks with a short-range shockwave, ducked a swing from the next, and sent it packing with a biotically-empowered roundhouse punch to the jaw, but the subsequent two manage to scratch up her shoulder with their claws before being crunched into a fine powder when she threw them into Samara's singularity. The Justicar's barrier was holding up well, keeping her injured body from any further damage, so Jack decided to focus on her own problems for a moment-which was good, as between her and Thane were four more husks, barely kept at bay with the drell's martial arts and-

"This is _KROGAAAAAN!_"

Ah, make that _no_ more husks, as Grunt had barreled straight through the pack with his crest leading the way. Three of the beasts were knocked aside and shattered on the ground like broken toys, and the fourth actually managed to hang onto Grunt's forehead, clawing and biting, until the krogan lifted it over his head and brought its spine down over his knee, folding it in half with a mighty crunch.

Jacob and Miranda were back to back in the center of the room, holding their own against a wave of husks that shattered against gunshots and biotic deflections; to their right, Zaeed's trusty flamethrower was mopping up a separate pack of husks, none of whom were intelligent enough to go around the cloud of burning fuel instead of simply rushing into it. All in all, Jack figured, they were holding the line nicely, despite the unexpected husk-rush. Things could probably be going worse.

Roughly thirty seconds later, and ten seconds after Jack remembered that thinking such things usually boded ominously, things began to go worse.

The white-hot arc of a continuous laser splattered on the side of their barricade, and Jack dove behind it for cover, taking the spot forcibly from its previous occupant (a husk) with a blast of her shotgun. She caught a glimpse of the Praetorian descending behind the door, and then it charged forth into the room and began unleashing the payload from its massive laser cannon on the rest of the room, shredding husks and scenery alike. Peering from behind her cover, Jack could see Zaeed unsling his flamethrower and begin taking shots at the fused mass of husks that made up the creature with an assault rifle. Samara did likewise with her pistol, but the Praetorian reared back with a dozen simultaneous shrieks.

"It's going for a strafing run!" Jacob shouted. "Evasive action!"

Unfortunately, Samara was right out in the open, and in no condition to run for cover. Thane hurried to her side to drag her behind the barricade, but it didn't look like they were going to make it before the laser swept over them. A surge of adrenaline rose in Jack's chest; she could see Thane carrying the Justicar towards cover as the Praetorian's weapon surged towards them, and in that moment, she decided that, for once in her life, doing something selfless didn't sound like such a dumb idea.

"Hey asshole!" The shockwave she launched at it did nothing to actually damage the Praetorian...but what it _did_ do was hit it in the side, spinning it a hundred and eighty degrees away from Samara and Thane. This meant that the laser jerked away from them, in the opposite direction it had previously been racing. Awesome.

Unfortunately, it also meant that the beam was now racing towards Jack.

She had just enough time to get out a started "...ah, fuck" and dive for cover before the Praetorian's attack blew out the row of terminals next to her. The force of the explosion drove the convict into the ground slightly harder than she'd expected, and she ended up thwacking the side of her head against the hard floor of the Collector station. The world blurred around Jack, then faded into a peaceful darkness as she blacked out.

* * *

"...pinned down at the entrance and taking heavy fire from a Praetorian."

"Copy that. Fall back to the Normandy ASAP; I'm setting a bomb in the core."

Jack blinked with confusion as the world swirled in a haze about her. She was propped against one of the barricades, and from the sounds in the background the Praetorian was still attacking. Raising her hand, the convict touched the side of her head; it came away sticky, warm, and red. Well, she was bleeding lightly, but she was still alive, and holed up with...

"Roger. We'll extract as soon as this thing's down." Miranda clicked her comm off and resumed taking shots at the hovering construct.

Wait, _what_? Miranda Lawson, the Cerberus cheerleader, had pulled her ass out of the fire?

This would not do. This would not do at all. Jack was not about to be indebted to her, not under any circumstances. She grabbed her shotgun and held onto the nearby barricade, dragging herself upright and nearly stumbling into Miranda, who blinked with surprise. "Oh," the other woman exclaimed. "You're up. The others are across the room, but we're cut off by that bloody Praetorian."

The aforementioned monster chose that moment to concentrate its attack on their position. Sparks flew from the end of the barricade as the laser bore down on it, blocking Jack from getting across to the others-at least, until Miranda pulled up a biotic shield and stepped out of cover, blocking the beam with the force of willpower alone. "Get going!" she shouted, straining against the Praetorian's might. "I've got you covered!"

Jack took a step towards the group on the other side of the chamber. She could see Thane with the rest of them, pouring rounds into the construct as its attention was distracted. All she had to do was make a run for him...

"...would not do at all," whispered a voice in her head, and she knew it was right.

Determined not to owe the cheerleader for anything, Jack extended her hands and added a wave of her own biotic energy to the shield. Her muscles tensed as some of the strain transferred from Miranda to her, but the two of them sharing it was significantly easier than one trying to hold the barrier alone.

"Likewise," she smirked. "Now fuckin' go already!"

Without another word, the two women charged across the chamber, vaulting an overturned barricade and keeping the shield up all the way. Although the Praetorian bore down on them, keeping its laser trained direction between the two, the barrier held up all the way back to the main group, where Jack caught a rustle of movement out of the corner of her eye. It was Thane, with Jacob close behind; the pair dashed wordlessly towards their position and threw their biotics into the shield, pushing back against the beam.

"Push it back!" Jacob bellowed over the beam's thunderous roar. "One...two...three..._heave_!"

As one, all four of them shoved hard against the Praetorian's assault; the construct staggered in the air and wobbled backwards, but the beam continued to bore into their improvised shield with every passing moment. Although Jack could hear the sounds of gunfire behind her (Grunt, Samara, and Zaeed were presumably unloading everything they had on the Praetorian's carapace), the enemy showed no signs of dropping before their shield did. All four of the biotics were exhausted, and it was showing as the barrier flickered and grew dim. Soon, it would drop altogether, and then-

_BLAM_.

A chunk blew off the Praetorian's side, causing the construct to swerve wildly in the air. Its attack fizzled out altogether as it swiveled to find its assailant.

_BLAM_.

The second shot struck home right in the center mass and blew the Praetorian's insides straight out its back. Bits of husk scattered all over the ground as it spiraled out of control, plummeting downwards and crashing into a barricade in a smoking heap. Its cybernetics-riddled form gave a final twitch, and then lay still.

"...What just happened?" Miranda exclaimed, bewildered. All eyes in the room followed the direction the shots had come from, and turning towards the door, they beheld their savior...

"A secure pathway to the egress point has been cleared," Legion announced. "All hostiles eliminated. We advise retreating to the Normandy immediately, as the destruction of the station is imminent." The geth racked its Widow antimaterial rifle, ejecting the glowing heatsink onto the floor.

"Addendum: _Do not fuck with us_."

A moment of stunned silence went by, and then Jack did the most reasonable thing possible: she burst into laughter.

And although she kept reminding herself to focus on the mission, all the way back to the ship, even as she attempted to help Thane carry Samara through the tunnels, Jack could hardly see straight, given how hard she was laughing at what Legion had apparently learned about organic interaction from her. Thankfully, Jacob and Zaeed joined in about halfway through, and by the time they'd reached the ship most of the group, with the exception of Samara (whom Jack was fairly sure never laughed at anything, ever) and Thane (who nonetheless was holding back a smirk), was just barely capable of standing upright as they hurried up the gangplank.

"Excellent!" Mordin exclaimed, hurrying up to them. "Just returned from medbay. Have treated crew; found no significant health risks and-"

He paused to look around the squad.

"...Have missed something. Joke, yes? Probably not ideal time, but always appreciate situational humor." The salarian snapped his fingers eight times in six seconds. "Spill! Wish to hear punchline."

Yeah, it was turning out to be a pretty good day after all.

* * *

**Two Days Later**

'Mission accomplished'. Jack had never heard a sweeter phrase, with the possible exception of 'oh god, please don't, I can pay you'.

The Collector base was dust, and against all odds, Shepard, Tali, and Garrus had come running out to the Normandy as the walls collapsed around them, giving the mission a no-casualty record-not at all what Jack had been expecting. She had to give the Commander some credit: he'd put a hell of a team together, considering they'd been able to come out of this with only a few injuries and no deaths.

Two days had passed since the SR-2 had come screaming back through the Omega-4 Relay, and most of the squad was currently on shore leave, in light of the fact that (while there were apparently preparations to be made, as Shepard claimed the Reaper problem was anything but over) they had been through hell in the last few months and could do with a weekend off. Although they were no longer officially aligned with Cerberus (a thought that made Jack a little happier about having the Commander on her side), Miranda and Jacob had resigned their positions in the interest of staying on board the Normandy. Zaeed had likewise agreed to stick around when Shepard offered a salary out of his personal funds, and Samara had granted an extension to her oath. Overall, it looked like everybody would be sticking together from here on out.

Everyone, that is, except Thane and Jack.

"I understand," Shepard said with a nod. "I imagine I'd want to do the same in your place, and you've both earned it. Thank you both for helping me."

"It was an honor, Commander," replied Thane. He shook the younger man's hand firmly, with his other arm still firmly around Jack's waist. "Thank you, in turn, for giving me the chance to make something of the time I have left."

Jack grinned at Shepard, and he returned the favor with a knowing chuckle. "So long, Jack. We've had a hell of a time, huh?"

"Yeah." The convict skipped over any formalities and simply punched him in the arm. "Look, um. When, uh..." She glanced over at Thane, her smile faltering a bit, and finally rephrased the sentence. "When you want me back, just...give me a few days to get it together, and let me know, okay? I still owe you one for all of this."

There was a glimmer of understanding in Shepard's eyes. "You've got all the time you want, Jack," he assured her. "I'll contact you in...probably a year or so. Take your time."

Jack nodded. "Thanks." With that, the two turned and strode down the hallway and into the elevator. As the doors closed in front of them, Jack called out, "Oh, and if you fuck the quarian, don't bareback it, dumbass. She'll get sick and die."

She had the satisfaction of seeing the Commander's face turn bright red in the instant before the elevator began descending.

* * *

Goodbyes went swiftly.

"Take it easy, kid," Zaeed groused, ruffling Jack's scalp with a hand. "Maybe I'll see you around, huh?" Next to him and Grunt, the holo was prominently displaying Blasto the hanar, surrounded by weapon-brandishing salarians.

"Give it up, Blasto," ordered the salarian general. "We're taking the bioweapon and there's nothing the Council can do, so you may as well surrender. You can't take us all at once."

"On the contrary," the hanar replied. "This one thinks that you're a bunch of unenkindled _nerds_."

Jack smirked at the holo. "Yeah. Maybe you will. See you round, Massani. Grunt."

"Jack," the krogan acknowledged with a nod.

Across the ship, Thane bowed politely. "It's been an honor, Samara."

"Likewise," the Justicar answered, her expression softening into a rare smile. "I...cannot say that my social skills have been anything approaching passable, considering the centuries I've spent alone, but I'd like to thank you for tolerating me nonetheless. You've been a good friend, Thane."

"As have you." He cautiously stepped forward and pulled Samara into a tentative hug. It was formal and stiff, but the intentions on both ends were sincere enough. "Please, take care of yourself."

"I will." The shark eyes studied him intently, but without the predatory gleam he was accustomed to. "In time, I think, the pain will subside...yes. In time." The asari's gaze fell. "Time is more precious a commodity to some than others, I suppose."

Thane shook his head. "I'm grateful for what I have left, and I intend to make the most of it. I suggest you do the same, in your own way."

Samara's eyes met his once more, and she nodded. "You _are_ a good man, Thane. Farewell."

* * *

The sun was just beginning to set over Nos Astra when they met at the Normandy's gangplank. All goodbyes had been said, and there was nothing left to do now but go their own way.

"So," Jack said with a wide, playful grin. "Goin' my way, hitman?"

"I believe I am," Thane answered. He couldn't quite suppress the contented smile that spread over his face. "The apartment is in the lower district of Nos Astra...it's still leased out for another three months. I wasn't sure how long I'd be after Ms. Dantius."

She nodded. "Sounds like a plan, then. Let's get going."

They crossed down to the platform together, hand in hand, and stepped forward into the future and whatever it held for them. For better or for worse, when the inevitable came, they'd face it together, mutually grounded, unshakeable, rock steady.

* * *

**EPILOGUE**

It was a nice apartment complex, all things considered. Jack supposed you could afford to live well in polite society, on an assassin's pay. She watched as Thane inserted his keycard and, sure enough, the light over the lock flickered a welcoming green.

"I know we talked about it, and...I'm as cool with it as I'm going to get," she murmured, pressing up against the drell from behind and wrapping an arm around him. "But dammit, Thane, I wish we had more time."

His chuckle vibrated deep in his back, sending little shivers through her head as she leaned against him, and the convict was distantly aware of Thane stroking the arm in front of him. "I'm aware, _siha_. And so do I. But for the next few months..." He opened the door to the apartment and took a gentle step forward, pulling her along with him. "...we have all the time in the world."

The door closed behind them. It was silent for approximately three seconds, and then-

"Oh good, you're back!" chirped a voice in the darkness. "I was starting to wonder if-"

_Chaos_ ensued for the next few seconds. Jack and Thane simultaneously pulled their pistols, falling all over each other (and drawing an indignant growl from Jack) in their attempts to get their weapons drawn and pointed at the mysterious intruder.

"Whoa, whoa! Don't shoot!" the voice exclaimed with alarm. "Don't, it's me!"

Thane fumbled for the light switch, and illuminated the apartment to reveal a familiar hooded form seated on their couch. He blinked once, twice, as if processing the situation. "...Kasumi?"

"In the flesh!" the thief announced cheerfully. "Sorry to just drop in like this..."

"The fuck are you doing in here?" Jack yelled, not quite ready to stop brandishing her weapon. Her attempts to raise it were foiled by a quick movement of Thane's arm, but the pistol nonetheless remained in her hand.

"...Right. About that..." Kasumi scratched at the back of her head, kicking at the carpet lightly. "Um...look, I know this is sudden, but there was this heist on Bekenstein three days ago. I don't know if you heard of it; you're busy people, after all, but-well, that was me. And it didn't go _quite_ as planned, and I kind of need to be hiding until it blows over, so..."

She attempted her best placating smile, which fell rather flat before Jack and Thane's deeply unamused expressions.

"...Can I stay with you two for a while?"

* * *

**THE END**

**A/N: **And so, we come to the conclusion of Rock Steady. What a long, strange trip it's been, from doing what was going to be a two-or-three-parter based on...well, really what was basically a dare, to a full-fledged story. As I mentioned in some of the earlier author's notes, everything about this was experimental. I'm a predominantly action-oriented person and here I was delving into romance (although I did manage to throw in the occasional gratuitous action scene. I hope you guys didn't mind! :P) So I'd like to say that this experiment has been a resounding success for me in that _I have had a BLAST_ writing it. It's challenged me in new and interesting ways and I feel that in many ways I've improved both my skill and my mindset while writing it.

As a great philosopher once said, thanks is given everyday but especially this day as the warriors give me the intensity to deliver the power at Survivor Series IT IS GOING TO BE A WAAAAAR. To put it somewhat more succinctly, there are quite a few people I'd like to thank, and they are as follows.

**Shynarala**, for challenging me to "take the strangest pairing you can think of in the ME2 cast and try to make it work". I don't think you had this in mind, and I _know_ I sure as hell didn't. I didn't even like the pairing at first, but as time has gone on, I think I've warmed up to it a lot more. Thanks for giving me that head start.

**The Neck Snap Appreciation Society** (NSAS), for essentially keeping me going on this thing. You ladies (and guy, in Rad's case) are awesome. I really don't know if I'd ever have finished this thing without you. Special thanks to InevitableTaxes, the love of my life. (ilu bee :D)

**IccaRa/ghost.713**, **AssaultSloth**, **BetaReject**, **spamhead80**, and **Katerina Kintari** for letting me bounce ideas off them and for always providing useful insight on how to write a story whenever I talked to them. I hope to someday be half as good a writer as the five of you are. Much love.

**Bioware** for making my second-favorite video game series (Legacy of Kain is my favorite but I don't think I could imitate the dialogue nearly well enough, haha).

**The ME LJ Comm **for their support. Thanks to everybody who recommended me; when I came by one day and saw that I had, for lack of a better word, fans, I didn't know what to say! It's really humbling to know that people enjoy my work, and you guys have made it a joy to work on.

**Jack fans** for liking Jack, because solidarity! (Sometimes I wonder if we saw eye to eye on pretty much anything in this, but I appreciate the feedback from all of the Jackolytes.)

Lastly, and most importantly, **everybody who read, favorited, reviewed, subscribed, whatever**. All of you are, more than anything else, what kept me going when I wondered if I should just give up on trying to put certain scenes into words. I have been amazed by the response this story got, and never in a thousand years would I have expected the kind of support you've shown me. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. You're wonderful, and you're awesome.


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